Jessica Soffer

Jessica Soffer earned her MFA at Hunter College. Her work has appeared in Granta, the New York Times, and Vogue, among other publications. She teaches fiction at Connecticut College and lives in New York City.

Soffer's new novel, her debut, is Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading.  Her reply:

Someone just gave me Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary and I can’t take it. I just can’t take it. Every word is gold. Every phrase I want tattooed on myself. Even her minutiae is brilliant. Especially her minutiae. And there are these moments in which you can tell, she tells you, that she is deeply, truly, “divinely” happy, as she puts it, and you forget how it ends. And then you remember and it’s heartbreaking.

I read George Saunders’ story, “Escape From Spiderhead,” three times the other day. It’s in his Tenth of December collection. And it’s amazing. It’s like a brilliant version of that “Kill Fuck Marry” game and generates the very same kind of self-doubt / self-loathing as you’re going along, reading, or playing, depending.

I was going to write a piece on which books not to give to your mother on Mother’s Day and so I was knee-deep in all manner of smut. I read Susan Minot’s novella, Rapture, which has been referred to as the 116-page blowjob. It is that, but it’s more than that too: an exploration of sex, disappointment, the disappointment of sex. Simply stated, it’s the most introspective act of oral sex I’ve ever come across and left me quite sure that introspection and oral sex should have nothing to do with one another. Ever.

Visit Jessica Soffer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue