Daniel Torday

Daniel Torday is the author of the novel The Last Flight of Poxl West, a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, and an International Dublin Literary Award nominee. Torday's work has appeared in The New York Times, NPR, The Paris Review Daily and Tin House, and has been honored in both the Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays series. A two-time National Jewish Book Awardee and winner the 2017 Sami Rohr Choice Prize, he is Director of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College.

Torday's second novel, Boomer1, is out now from St. Martin's Press.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Torday's reply:

I'm plagued by an affliction where I always have about six books going at the same time-- I'll never lose the excitement of cracking a new novel or story collection, and I'll never underestimate how slowly a good book deserves to be read.

So I'm currently 400pp into The Magic Mountain, and hope to finish while there are still coral reefs. I've read about half the stories in Lauren Groff's Florida, the best of which are as good as it gets-- oh, man, one called "Snake Stories" might be the best story I've read all year. I'm a huge Deborah Eisenberg fan, so the publication of Your Duck Is My Duck for me is like a new Bon Iver record dropping. She had me on stage a couple years ago to read one of the voices from it and it was a life highlight.

Oh, and I'm on leave from teaching this year so one of my indulgent projects is to become a Joseph Conrad completist-- I gobbled up Maya Jasanoff's beautiful new-ish book on him called The Dawn Watch a couple months back. Now I'm about half through Nostromo, which is the most challenging book I've read in a long time, and also the most beautiful in many ways. Finally, I've always got at least one book of poetry going-- I'm loving Iain Haley Pollock's second book, Ghost, Like a Place. All the Philadelphia therein is so movingly portrayed...

Visit Daniel Torday's website.

--Marshal Zeringue