Michelle Falkoff

Michelle Falkoff's fiction and reviews have been published in ZYZZYVA, DoubleTake, and the Harvard Review, among other places. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and currently serves as Director of Communication and Legal Reasoning at Northwestern University School of Law.

Playlist for the Dead is her first novel.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Falkoff's reply:

These days, I’m alternating between “adult” fiction (is that really a thing?) and Young Adult fiction written by members of my debut group, the Fearless Fifteeners. I read pretty broadly across genres, so I’ll highlights some recent favorites in a few categories.

Literary:

Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You tells the story of a marriage between a white woman and a Chinese-American man, alternating between the 1950s, when they met, and the 1970s, when one of their children has gone missing. The discussion of race is complicated and sophisticated and so very welcome, and Ng moves between voices in a way that looks effortless but that takes a tremendous amount of work and talent.

Mystery:

I don’t need to work too hard to convince people to read Tana French these days—I’ve loved her stuff since her first book came out. Her latest, The Secret Place , concerns a murder at a boarding school and alternates perspective between one of the detectives on the case and the girls at the school. In that way, it was a perfect hybrid read for me, one that should appeal to both adults and teenagers.

YA:

I don’t want to say too much about Amanda Panitch’s Damage Done, forthcoming in July 2015, because part of what makes it so engaging is figuring out what’s really going on. I’ll just say that it concerns one of my favorite topics, and if you read it, you’ll be able to tell what that is.

Visit Michelle Falkoff's website.

--Marshal Zeringue