James Conaway is a former Wallace Stegner writing fellow at Stanford University and an Alicia Patterson journalism fellow, and the author of three novels, The Big Easy, World’s End, and the newly-released Nose.A couple of weeks ago I asked the author about what he was reading. Conaway's reply:
I'm reading contemporary British fiction right now, probably because I'm working on a prequel to Nose, set in the late 'seventies, when the young wine critic, Clyde Craven-Jones, first comes to California andLearn more about the book and author at James Conway's blog.gets involved with a near-defunct wine-making family possibly bound for greatness, a kind of far-side of Downton Abbey. But I'm having serious trouble getting through Martin Amis's work, whose prose seems overly weighted with London low-life colloquialisms and is in no way elegant. Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth starts well but the literary device doesn't work as well as the one in Atonement, I don't think. And the novels of St. Aubyn are pretty bleak but beautifully, tightly written and highly recommended.
--Marshal Zeringue
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