Andrew Gelman

Andrew Gelman is a professor in the Departments of Statistics and Political Science at Columbia University, director of the Applied Statistics Center, and also the founding director of the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences program.

His latest book is Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do.

I recently asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I've been reading Personal Days, by Ed Park, which based on the reviews (and the first couple of chapters, which is what I've read so far) is a remake of Joshua Ferris's Then We Come to the End, last year's hilarious and claustrophobic satire on office-cubicle life. Ferris's and Park's books read like a cross between Geoffrey O'Brien and Don DeLillo, only funnier. Or like a fast-forward Richard Ford without the smugness. I'm impressed how novel-writing technique has improved in recent decades. John Updike was pretty slick, but Ferris and Park (and, for that matter, Ford) really seem in total control of their material, even in comparison to the masters of the previous generations. Sure, there was Nabokov (and, in his own way, James Jones), but that's about it from back then. Now there seem to be a lot of novelists who really know what they're doing in this way. (I think Jonathan Coe could have total control of his material too, if he really felt like it. He seems like Mailer or (Martin) Amis in his desire to shatter his own smooth surfaces.)

I'm also reading Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940-1941, by British historian Ian Kershaw. He goes into the historical evidence on how the leaders of Germany, Japan, the United States and the other WW2 participants made some of their seemingly inexplicable decisions. In addition to giving background on the historical personalities involved, Kershaw's book is fascinating in how it focuses on the decision-making process within each country. In the writing style as well as in content, this book reminds me of A. J. P. Taylor's classic Origins of the Second World War.

Visit the official website for Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State.

Learn more about Andrew Gelman and his work at his website and his blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Manuel Muñoz

Manuel Muñoz is the author of two collections of short stories: Zigzagger (Northwestern University Press, 2003) and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007), which was shortlisted for the 2007 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize.

He is a member of the faculty of the University of Arizona's creative writing program.

Earlier this month I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

My undergrads have begun with the 2008 edition of The O. Henry Prize Stories, and I'm getting a real kick at introducing them to writers many of them have never encountered. Steven Millhauser was an enormous hit with them and it's heartening to know that a few students will seek out more of his work because of this exposure. I look forward to seeing how they'll respond to Edward P. Jones and Mary Gaitskill, to name just two of my own favorites in this year's anthology.

For pleasure, I've begun Joan Silber's just-released novel, The Size of the World. I'm an enormous fan of her collection Ideas of Heaven, and I'm captivated once again by her easy style and her effortless command. I'm savoring this one.

A book I started too late to assign to my undergrads, but will appear on a syllabus in the spring, is Asali Solomon's fantastic short story collection, Get Down: I sense my students will respond well to her extraordinary warmth and humor, even in difficult situations. And I can't wait to start Walk the Blue Fields, by the Irish writer Claire Keegan. I recently met both of these writers at a conference in Cork and came away quite impressed. Sadly, it was only Keegan whom I got to see on a panel: she was terrific on one about Irish literature, and I was quite taken with her composure, her sure-footed commitment to her writing, and her extremely intelligent reasoning for its place in the world.

Visit Manuel Muñoz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Margot Kahn

Margot Kahn is the author of Horses That Buck: The Story of Champion Bronc Rider Bill Smith.

Her work and book reviews have appeared in various print and online publications including Work Magazine, Pindeldyboz, Ohioana Quarterly, and Publishers Weekly. In 2005 she received the Ohioana Library Association’s Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant for a promising young writer.

Kahn is currently the youth programs manager at Richard Hugo House, a literary arts center in Seattle, and a writer-in-residence with the Seattle Arts & Lectures program Writers in the Schools.

Last week I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

This summer’s been a strange one. First, it didn’t start acting like summer until the middle of July, right when I had to start teaching creative writing workshops at Richard Hugo House, Seattle’s great literary center. While I wanted to be in a meadow somewhere on the edge of a snowfield, watching the wildflowers open, drifting in and out of the stack of books I’d picked up in May at Elliott Bay, I was instead inside, surrounded by high school hormones, revisiting my old favorite lines. It was bittersweet.

I relished rereading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Collected Stories, and I was ecstatic to see the spastic kid who hadn’t written much in a week sit buried in that book for the rest of the afternoon. I went back to Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club for a lesson on memoir and to John D’Agata’s lovely The Next American Essay collection to show that not all essays are five-paragraph bores. We looked at Junot Diaz’s stories in Drown for, among other things, dialogue. And I went back to The Collected Works of Billy the Kid for its inventive construction, gorgeous lyricism and that Western thing that I love.

Several fantastic Seattle writers came to visit our workshop and I was delighted to discover their work in the process. Among them, Catharine Wing’s collection of poems Enter Invisible and Ryan Boudinot’s hysterical and creepy collection of short stories The Littlest Hitler made me laugh, cry and hide in my house for days.

In my own time, what little of it there was, I read two stories of marriage: Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees and Andrew Sean Greer’s The Story of a Marriage. Both of these books cover decades of time and seas of emotion in tight style. And it’s rare for me to get so caught up in such gorgeous sentences, in a story so perfectly paced, that I look up at a certain discovery and say out loud, “How did he do that?” But this happened to me twice in Greer’s book, making me want to turn back to the first page the very moment I finished the last.

Next on my list: The Boat by Nam Le and The Curtain by Milan Kundera. I’m also looking forward to Cody Walker’s first collection of poems, Shuffle and Breakdown, coming out in November.

Read more about Margot Kahn's Horses That Buck at the publisher's website.

Visit Margot Kahn's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James L. Nelson

James L. Nelson is an award-winning maritime author who Patrick O'Brian called "A master of his period and of the English language."

I recently asked Nelson what he was reading. His reply:

Thomas Fleming recently mentioned he was reading one of my novels. It might sound like literary quid pro quo to say I am reading one of his, but he and I just did a book swap so I am in fact reading his novel Dreams of Glory. I have long admired Tom's nonfiction but have not read any of his novels. Good stuff, his knowledge of the period shines through.

Prior to that I read William Hammond's novel of the Revolutionary War navy, A Matter of Honor. Again, the research is unassailable and the characters well drawn.

Still on the shelf: David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed, which I started though I knew that other things were going to get in the way. Albion's Seed has been a "must read" for a few years.

Also on deck, Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs, since every once in a while I have to read something that is not about the American Revolution!

That will be a brief diversion, however. I'm just launching into writing a new book on the Battle of Yorktown and the naval battle that preceded it, so I suspect much of my reading will be directed in that effort. One book I'll be revisiting for that is Piers Mackesy's terrific The War for America. Not what you would call a page-turner, but a brilliant and insightful work.

James L. Nelson is the author of the recently published George Washington's Secret Navy and Benedict Arnold’s Navy, and several novels that take place during the age of the sailing navies. His first book of nonfiction was Reign of Iron: The Story of the First Battling Ironclads.

Learn more about James L. Nelson and his work at his website.

--Marshal Zeringue

J.B. Shank

J. B. Shank is an associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota.

His new book is The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment, about which the University of London's Colin Jones writes: "Shank offers a fresh and genuinely innovative account of a key period and takes the reader into the scientific and philosophical worlds that grappled with the legacy of Newton, one of the master scientists of the early modern world."

Last week I asked Shank what he was reading. His reply:

I always have several books in different genres going at once, and as I am starting a sabbatical this year I have more than the usual number in process. Since I have sadly finished all of W.G. Sebald's novels, I continue to long for similar stories imbedded in history, memory, and fragile subjectivity. One I read recently that I liked a lot was Pascal Mercier's Night Train to Lisbon. Mercier is a German-Swiss philosophy professor, and his novel is a story of mid-life crisis as moment of self-awakening all set within the recent political history of Portugal.

Related to my on-going work in science studies is Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek which I read for the first time this past summer. I was drawn to the book by what I knew of Dillard's particular philosophical and theological orientation, but what I also found was a compelling and elegantly written book with a richly humane perspective on natural science and its capacity to excite wonder about nature.

My new historical research focuses on the work of Galileo Galilei, and a technical monograph that is teaching me many things is Domenico Bertoloni Meli's Thinking with Objects: The Transformation of Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century, a study that stresses the hands-on historical contingencies that were essential to the making of modern mathematical mechanics. To better understand the context that produced Galileo's science, I am also returning to a book that is routinely referenced but rarely actually read anymore: Jacob Burckhardt's pioneering The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy first published in 1860. The book literally defined the modern field of Renaissance history, and I am interested in returning to this founding text first hand so as to compare the Renaissance as Burckhardt understands it with the historical literature that his since been generated by his work.

I am also intrigued by Joseph Mali's discussion of Burckhardt in his book Mythhistory: The Making of a Modern Historiography. Mali sees Burckhardt as a classic mythhistorian in his recognition that history is an indissoluble fusion of empirical fact and imagination, and thus science and myth, and since Galileo is another figure fruitfully understood through the frameworks of mythhistory as Mali defines them, I am also interested in reading Burckhardt's account of the Renaissance for the models it may offer for thinking and writing about Galileo.

I also frequently have some philosophical titles on my reading list, and at the top of the pile right now is Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston's Objectivity, an account of the emergence of detached objectivity, and the subjectivity that anchored it, as epistemological and ethical ideals in nineteenth century Europe.

On deck are Paul Ricoeur's recently translated magnum opus, Memory, History, Forgetting and Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, each of which speak, albeit in very different ways, to the particular union of history and philosophy at the center of my own historical research and writing.

In the spirit of the "campaign season," I also read Thomas Frank's new book The Wrecking Crew. This is the third installment in what is an evolving critique of the "New Right" that has overtaken American politics since the late 1970s. Frank's first two books were One Market Under God and What's the Matter with Kansas?, and while I continue to hope that Frank will someday turn his attention toward explaining why the movements that he so brilliantly describes had the power that they did (he treats the development as a kind of mass delusion), his neo-muckraking style (H.L. Mencken is his idol, but he is also a child of the post-Hunter S. Thompson generation) provides the perfect antidote to the on-going absurdities of Fox News and "Red America" political discourse. Indeed, put Frank's three books together and you have the perfect hermeneutic for interpreting every dimension of the Sarah Palin phenomenon.

Read more about The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment at the University of Chicago Press website.

Learn more about J.B. Shank's work at his faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ronald Wallace

The writer-poet Ronald Wallace is Felix Pollak Professor of Poetry and Halls-Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Recently, I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I'm just back from a week hiking in the Tetons where I read Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping again, and am in the middle of Gilead with Home on tap.

I'm now beginning to read the 800 poetry book manuscripts submitted to the Brittingham and Pollak Prizes in poetry at the University of Wisconsin Press (I read something in each submission) which leaves me time to read little else during September, October, and November.

After that I plan to return to reading poetry in translation, a project I began this summer (Neruda, Vallejo, Tranströmer, Issa, others).

Ronald Wallace's latest book of poetry is For a Limited Time Only. He is the author of seven previous books of poetry, including: Long for This World: New and Selected Poems; The Uses of Adversity; Time's Fancy; People and Dog in the Sun; and The Makings of Happiness.

His works of literary criticism include: God Be with the Clown: Humor in American Poetry; The Last Laugh: Form and Affirmation in the Contemporary American Comic Novel; and Henry James and the Comic Form.

Read a selection of Wallace's poems and learn more about his work at his website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Margaret Luongo

Margaret Luongo teaches creative writing at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Her stories have appeared in Tin House, FENCE, Cincinnati Review, and other journals. Her new book of stories is If the Heart Is Lean.

A few days ago I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

The semester has started up, so I’m dipping into story collections more and more. I just finished Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson,” which a friend had recommended. I’d told her I was thinking about writing a doppelganger story set in Ohio, and she set me on this Poe story. I have a collection of his work—the poetry and the stories—which I’ve had since childhood. I read Poe heavily as a teenager, and I loved his feverish prose—still do. The story is classic Poe: a dark tone, and a character going too far into darkness.

Last spring, Alexandra Chasin came to read at Miami University. She read from her story collection Kissed By for a solid hour, and I was transfixed—not normal for me. Generally, I’m good for about 35 minutes. Last night, I read “Two Alphabets” aloud to my husband in the car as we drove to Cincinnati, and I kept going back to re-read passages that were just gorgeous—beautiful, moving rhythm and language. The collection was published by FC2 and the stories are experimental, but that should not put people off. The stories I’ve heard and read are full of emotion and humanity. Chasin’s intelligence informs her choices and enhances what is moving in every day life. Everything is heightened yet believable, somehow polished and raw at the same time.

When I was preparing to teach an intro to Creative Writing class last year, I went to the library to check out Amy Bloom’s Come to Me, which I love. I ended up also getting Dagoberto Gilb’s Woodcuts of Women, a collection of 10 stories and woodcuts. I’m just getting around to reading it now. His characters love women and they love love. If menace can be delicate, it is here; linked to desire and vanity, it’s all the more unsettling. I’m only two stories in, but already I know I’ll want to re-read these stories.

Read more about Margaret Luongo's If the Heart Is Lean at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James K. Galbraith

James K. Galbraith holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen, Jr., Chair in Government / Business Relations at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

His latest book is The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. The Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz said The Predator State "[s]hows how to break the spell that conservatives have cast over the minds of liberals (and everyone else) for many years."

Earlier this week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

Cabezo da Vaca's Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America. Translated and Edited by Cyclone Covey, 1983, University of New Mexico Press. I picked it up by happenstance; a gripping tale.

Earlier this summer I read the Inferno, in the Ciardi translation, amazingly for the first time. It was good to learn what will happen, in due course, to the present architects of the McCain campaign.

Next on the list: the galleys of Edward Fullbrook's Pluralist Economics, forthcoming from Zed books.

And at the top of the to-do pile: Andrew Gelman's brand-new Red State Blue State: Why Americans Vote as They Do. Gelman is an elegant practical statistician, a rare skill.

Read an excerpt from The Predator State, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

Learn more about James K. Galbraith's work at his faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Fleming

Thomas Fleming's latest book is The Perils of Peace: America's Struggle for Survival After Yorktown.

Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

One writer I've recently gotten interested in is James L. Nelson. He's written a series of novels about the American Revolution at sea, good stories told with great authenticity. He really knows18th Century ships and seamen. He's also written several novels about the Civil War navy. As an ex-Navy guy, I'm partial to salt water sagas. Nelson made me nostalgic for the years in the 1980s when I was writing my tribute to my fellow WWII swabbies, Time and Tide.

I'm also reading about James Madison, who plays a role in a book I'm writing about women in the lives of the founding fathers. Two books I liked were A Perfect Union by Catherine Allgor, a biography of Dolley, and The Last of the Fathers by Drew R. McCoy, about Madison's old age.

I also enjoy picking up novels I meant to read but missed. One I enjoyed immensely is State of Fear by Michael Crichton, which convinced me all over again that Al Gore and Global Warming are both diseases of the public mind.

I also like to reread something I read as a mere youth. So I went back to F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise. As a novel it isn't the greatest but the prose is wonderful and it reminded me of how deeply F. Scott was involved with his Irish-Catholic heritage. I found that rather moving, having gone back to my own I-C boyhood in my recent memoir, Mysteries of My Father, and served as chief consultant to the forthcoming An Irish-American Chronicle, about the whole I-A experience in the free world (aka the US) which is coming out next St. Patrick's Day.

Thomas Fleming is the author of more than forty novels and nonfiction books, including bestsellers such as The Officers' Wives, Time and Tide, and Liberty! The American Revolution. He is a frequent guest and contributor to NPR, PBS, A&E, and the History Channel. He was the principal commentator on the award-winning PBS documentary The Irish in America: Long Journey Home. A Fellow of the Society of American Historians, Fleming has served as chairman of the American Revolution Round Table and president of the American Center of P.E.N., the international writer's organization.

Visit Thomas Fleming's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amanda Petrusich

Amanda Petrusich is the author of Pink Moon, a short book about Nick Drake's 1972 album for Continuum's 33 1/3 series, and It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music.

Earlier this month I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I have a bad habit of reading my favorite books over and over again; at a certain point it becomes less about the content and more about wanting to tap into – and, if we're being honest, emulate – whatever weird magic drew me to them in the first place. I've probably read Ellen Willis' Beginning to See the Light three times in the last few months; her essay on Elvis – in which she speculates that Elvis' longtime manager, Colonel Tom Parker, is "just an ectoplasmic projection of Presley's Hollywood side" – is only two or three pages, but it's also one of the most astute, thoughtful, and hilarious criticisms of Elvis Presley that I've ever read. Ellen Willis has impeccable rhythm as a writer; each word snaps into place.

This summer I was also lucky enough to read two books that were written by good friends: Horses that Buck by Margot Kahn and Welcome to Shirley by Kelly McMasters. Each offers its readers a different portrait of a different America; both are lovingly rendered and tremendously written, as complicated (and compelling) as the country they portray. Horses That Buck is the story of Bill Smith, the three-time world champion saddle bronc rider; Welcome to Shirley is the author's memoir of her childhood in Shirley, Long Island, the site of the contentious and potentially lethal Brookhaven National Laboratory.

I'm also a glutton for good food writing – I brought Calvin Trillin's The Tummy Trilogy and Julia Child's My Life in France on vacation, and finished them both almost immediately. Trillin and Child are both incredibly charming narrators, and ace stylists.

Among the praise for Petrusich's It Still Moves:

“Like a smart, genial Persephone, Amanda Petrusich wanders the underworld of American roots music and reports back her insights with an open mind and an open heart. She has a respect for history and an even greater respect for the passion that keeps history alive and meaningful.”
—Anthony DeCurtis, Contributing Editor, Rolling Stone

Learn more about the book and author from Petrusich's interview with Salon.com.

--Marshal Zeringue