Nomi Eve is the author of Henna House and The Family Orchard, which was a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection and was nominated for a National Jewish Book Award.She has an MFA in fiction writing from Brown University and has worked as a freelance book reviewer for The Village Voice and New York Newsday.
Her stories have appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, The Voice Literary Supplement, Conjunctions, and The International Quarterly.
Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Eve's reply:
I just finished The Girl with All the Gifts. I am an eclectic reader, and devour zombie books and thrillers side by sides with literaryVisit Nomi Eve's website and Facebook page.classics. I couldn’t put The Girl down. The fast-paced plot along with devastatingly precise descriptions of a doomed world and its inhabitants had me from the first word to the last. I am a firm believer that a good book offers up something new to the world. This book certainly does that – with a vision of zombie-hood that is utterly different than any I’d read before.
Before The Girl with all the Gifts, I read A Separate Peace, which I hadn’t read since high school. A few times a year I dip back into my old high school syllabus. Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, Call of the Wild, Lord of the Flies, these books remind me why I became a writer, and a reader. I am a big fan of first person narration,and also of elegies. Something about the intimacy of elegies always gets me – I’m a sucker for love songs to lost friends and lovers (think Brideshead, The Virgin Suicides, A River Runs through It, My Antonia). A Separate Peace certainly fits the bill. The narrator, Gene Forester prays to the heavy-hitting thematic trinity of love, jealousy and guilt. His friend Finny’s fate is the fate of an entire generation whose lives were sacrificed during WWII, for a much greater cause than the boyhood games that play across the pages of this book.
My Book, The Movie: Henna House.
--Marshal Zeringue
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