Christopher Bollen

Christopher Bollen is the author of The Destroyers, Orient, which was an NPR Best Book of the Year, and the critically acclaimed Lightning People. He is the editor at large of Interview magazine. His work has appeared in GQ, the New York Times, New York magazine, and Artforum, among other publications. He lives in New York City.

Bollen's new novel is A Beautiful Crime.

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

Something horrible has happened: I’ve run out of Graham Greenes. I knew this day would come and I’ve been spacing the last, esoteric, hard-to-find ones out, one every few months, just to keep the addiction alive. But I’m afraid I’ve reached the finish line. While I’m considering going back and re-reading them all again, I’ve been free to roam in my reading lately. I have been making my way through Peter Hessler’s fantastic exploration of modern-day Cairo in The Buried: An Archeology of The Egyptian Revolution. I can tell that Hessler falls for cities the way I do, hunting out their lives, underlives, and secrets, in this rich and wonderfully written biography of a time and place.

I also just finished Teddy Wayne’s new novel, out next month, called Apartment. Wayne has the ability to do all of the things that I can’t do in a novel: he writes so many effective characters and moods and tense atmosphere in such lean prose, I’m always amazed by his control and economy. And he can turn up the stakes without the plot having to lead to a murder (I always seem to be ending up with blood on character’s hands). Apartment is a terrific and true portrait of New York City in the mid 1990s (I can vouch for that as someone who was there), and of the relationship between two men that walks the line between love and hate.

Visit Christopher Bollen's website.

The Page 69 Test: A Beautiful Crime.

My Book, The Movie: A Beautiful Crime.

--Marshal Zeringue