Saturday, February 14, 2009

Antonya Nelson

Antonya Nelson's short story collections include Some Fun, In The Land Of Men, and the newly published Nothing Right (Bloomsbury, 2009).

Her three novels are Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl, and Living to Tell.

Nelson's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. Her books have been New York Times Notable Books of 1992, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002, and she was named in 1999 by The New Yorker as one of the “twenty young fiction writers for the new millennium.”

Recently, I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:
I'm reading a lot of things simultaneously (judging prizes, teaching classes) but at the end of the day, or the middle of the night, what I've got going is the latest installment of a police procedural series written by Arnaldur Indridason (Icelandic) called The Draining Lake. It (and the three books that precede it) is dry humored, well plotted, full of great characters and mordant wit. The spareness of the landscape and the solitude of the main detective give the series a pleasing gravitas that is punctuated by occasional laugh-out-loud dialogue, as well as desperate secondary and tertiary characters.
Read more about Antonya Nelson's new short story collection, Nothing Right.

--Marshal Zeringue