Yona Zeldis McDonough is the author of the novels A Wedding in Great Neck, Breaking the Bank, In Dahlia's Wake, and The Four Temperaments, as well as nineteen books for children. She is also the editor of two essay collections and is the Fiction Editor at Lilith magazine. Her award-winning short fiction, articles, and essays have been published in anthologies and in numerous national magazines and newspapers. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband, two children and three very yappy Pomeranians.A few weeks ago I asked the author what she was reading. Her reply:
I recently read Heft, by Liz Moore. The protagonist of this wholly original, moving story weighs 500 pounds and has not been out of his houseVisit Yona Zeldis McDonough's website.in years. His gradual emergence from his loneliness and seclusion is set against the story of a teen-aged boy who loses his mother—and who may or may not be his son. The characters were so real, so convincing and so deeply human it was impossible not to love them all, and to wish ardently for their happiness.
I also just finished Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision and was thrilled to have discovered this previously under-the-radar writer. Her stories are so complex, subtle, illuminating and powerful—yet they are also compulsively readable,the literary equivalent of a box of bons bons.
Finally, I have been dipping into the Collected Works of William Butler Yeats, a volume I bought when I was a freshman in college in the fall of 1974. There are poems I have been reading since that time and I love them every bit as much now as I did when I first encountered them. And reading a poem I have never read before is like discovering a new star or planet—everything glows a little brighter in its presence.
Read--Coffee with a Canine: Yona Zeldis McDonough & Queenie, Willa and Holden.
The Page 69 Test: A Wedding in Great Neck.
--Marshal Zeringue
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