Jason Gurley is the author of the novels Greatfall, The Man Who Ended the World, and the ongoing Movement series. His bestselling self-published novel Eleanor was acquired by Crown Publishing in the U.S., HarperCollins in the U.K., Editora Rocco in Brazil, Arunas in Turkey, and Heyne Verlag in Germany. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed Magazine and numerous anthologies, among them Loosed Upon the World and Help Fund My Robot Army!!! from editor John Joseph Adams. Gurley lives and writes in Oregon.Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Gurley's reply:
I wish I had all the time in the world to read all of the books on my to-be-read list. (It’s less a list and more a collection ofVisit Jason Gurley's website.towering bookshelves, full of books, already purchased, that I am slowly working my way through.)
Lately I’m alternating between two books:
The first is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s sobering, powerful Between the World and Me. I adore it for all of its difficult truths, its perspective that is so different from my own, and I’m grateful, not only that it exists, but that it has been so widely read. “I resolved to hide nothing from you,” Coates writes to his son, and the book fulfills that statement. It’s beautifully written, and utterly necessary.
The second is Alexis Smith’s Marrow Island, which I’m reading as an advance copy. (It’s due out in June.) Smith is a fellow Portlander, and her prior novel, Glaciers, was delightful and moving. Marrow is damp and grainy and saturated with mystery and memory, and I’ve been savoring every page. I envy a lot of writers their prose, and I want to envy Smith’s—which is so, so gorgeous—but instead I’m just happy to be carried away by it.
The Page 69 Test: Eleanor.
My Book, The Movie: Eleanor.
--Marshal Zeringue
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