Justin Taylor

Justin Taylor edited the acclaimed short fiction anthology The Apocalypse Reader, and is the author of Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, a New York Times Editors' Choice. The Gospel of Anarchy is his first novel.

A few weeks ago I asked him what he was reading. His reply:

I hate to be the guy who talks about the book nobody else can read yet, but yesterday I read the galley of Rebecca Wolff's novel, The Beginners, which is out from Riverhead in June. The prose is incredibly lush, even hypnotic--and the story has this great dreamy pull to it. I actually forced myself to stop about thirty pages out from the end, because it was two o'clock in the morning and because I wanted to prolong the experience some, but when I woke up today the first thing I did was grab it off the nightstand and finish. It reminded me of Jenny Offill's Last Things (another book I read in a day, give or take) and one of Wolff's blurbers mentions Mary Gaitskill, which makes sense as well, but it's truly its own strange thing. I'm very much hoping to have the chance to write about it when it comes out.

A new book that you can actually get your hands on right now is Jeremy Schmall and the Cult of Comfort by Jeremy Schmall. I wrote a little spiel about this a couple weeks ago for a bookstore blog, but the upshot is it's funny and dark and I think you will love it. You can read the three paragraphs supporting this assertion (plus a sample poem) at the McNally Jackson tumblr.

Visit Justin Taylor's website.

The Page 69 Test: Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever: Stories by Justin Taylor.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan Conley

Susan Conley is a native of Maine whose work has been published in magazines such as The Paris Review, the Harvard Review and The North American Review. Her New York Times Magazine “Lives” column about living in China and contending with the H1N1 epidemic got the attention of a lot of readers. As an editor at Ploughshares Magazine in Boston, she wrote book reviews and profiles. She’s also taught creative writing and literature at several colleges.

Conley's new book is the memoir The Foremost Good Fortune.

Last month I asked her what she reading. Her reply:

The book that I want to talk about is one that I read kind of by accident. I mean I bought the book. But that was at one of those airport bookstore kiosks when I was on the run last fall. How Tracy Kidder’s beautiful, resonant stories even end up at LaGuardia is a mystery to me but there was one Strength in What Remains and I grabbed it because Borders was having a two for one book sale. It’s not that I didn’t want to read Strength in What Remains. I love just about anything Kidder writes.

It’s that I knew the book would ask something of me and I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to deliver. I’d just finished writing The Foremost Good Fortune — a memoir about living in China and getting cancer, and my head was full of white noise: book tour logistics and how to register for a Facebook account. So I sat in the blue bucket seat at Gate 23B and read the forgettable novel I’d just bought and waited for my plane to board. And when it did board, I stood up, gathered my things, and accidentally on purpose left that forgettable novel on the seat.

After take off, I needed something else to read. What finishing my own book had done was create this chatter in my head about book launches and to Twitter or not to Twitter and who could take my author headshot. Some of it was really silly stuff. Arcane. But stuff that can look like a big deal when you’re in New York City meeting with your agent and your editor and you want your own little book to matter somehow.

So I took a big breath on the airplane and opened the first page of Strength in What Remains, and right away I was in deep. What the book did was clear out the white noise. Kidder’s writing is so quiet and crystallized that it drew me in entirely and I was humbled. I forgot anything I’d been thinking about Facebook. I was enthralled and horrified with the story Kidder told. The tension and transparency of his prose kept me rapt—so much so that I still carry the book around with me now that I’m actually on my book tour. Kidder’s book speaks of great, human atrocities and just as great reserves of strength and humanity. There is a kind of balance sheet. And the pure luck involved in surviving to tell the story is also staggering. I look at the book in my hotel room, and I still feel wonder at how Kidder was able to write it, and I also still feel awe for the people who live inside the pages.

Visit Susan Conley's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Buchan

Elizabeth Buchan is the author of several highly acclaimed and bestselling books of fiction, including the bestselling Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman, The Good Wife Strikes Back, Everything She Thought She Wanted, and Consider the Lily.

Her latest novel is Separate Beds.

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

I am deep into Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China [US title: Pearl Buck in China: Journey to The Good Earth] by Hilary Spurling, a riveting biography of the author of The Good Earth which sold millions all over the world. The author’s evocation of China of the early 1900’s and its effect on the girl – an American who thought and dreamt in Chinese - as she struggled to find her place in the world, having been brought up in household of a fanatical missionary father is superb.

Anne Tyler’s poignant and truthful The Amateur Marriage also has kept me up late into the night. There is no one to beat her for observation, unsentimental tenderness and compassion. She is the great mapper of the ordinary human heart. In this story of marriage, which began in a blaze of hope and anticipation, the relationships are whittled away by the small, everyday chafing of personalities. Yet, even after it has reached its conclusion neither Michael nor Pauline are ever free of each other. As Muriel Spark once wrote: ‘relationships never end only novels do.’

I am about to embark on Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin, the story of man in Berlin during the war who is goaded into resistance to the Nazis. ‘Gripping’, ‘paced like a thriller’, a ‘masterpiece’… I have heard nothing but excellent reports of it and it is top of the pile. I am fascinated by the Second World War and wrote a novel about it and I know this one will be authentic and shattering.

Visit Elizabeth Buchan's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Separate Beds.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kevin C. Elliott

Kevin Elliott is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina.

His new book is Is a Little Pollution Good for You? Incorporating Societal Values in Environmental Research (Oxford University Press, 2011).

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

Perhaps the most engaging book that I am reading at the moment is Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man. I’ve just started it, so I cannot vouch for the book as a whole, but it appears to be quite inspiring. Beavan recounts the adventures of his family as they attempt to live for a year while having as little impact as possible on the environment—minimizing waste production, electricity use, impact on climate change, etc. As a philosopher, I have to admit that the framing of the book in terms of “no impact” seems a bit off-base. Beavan makes it sound like any change that we make to the environment is bad, or at least that we can easily categorize our impacts into good ones and bad ones so that we can calculate a single measure of our “net” impact. This seems a bit too simple to me. Nevertheless, Beavan’s overall point is important—we should be doing much more as individuals to lessen the ways in which we do obvious harm to our environment.

I also recently read an edited volume called Agnotology, by historians Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger. It argues for the fascinating thesis that we could learn a lot more about our knowledge by exploring what we don’t know and how we fail to know it. In his introduction to the volume, Proctor argues that we should be investigating at least three forms of non-knowledge: (1) ignorance as native state or starting point; (2) ignorance as lost realm or selective choice; and (3) ignorance as strategic ploy or active construct. I think that the first and third categories are often easier to recognize than the second one. It’s typically fairly obvious that we just haven’t studied something. We as a society are also becoming more cognizant of the ways that powerful interest groups foster the impression of ignorance about issues like acid rain or climate change in an effort to prevent government regulations. As an internal tobacco-industry document famously stated, “Doubt is our product.” I think that the second category of ignorance—lost realm or selective choice—deserves much more attention. Two other books that I have been reading illustrate the significance of choosing to study some phenomena in great detail while remaining largely ignorant of others.

A new report from the Worldwatch Institute, State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet, explores ways that agricultural practices could be altered to become more environmentally friendly, especially in developing countries. A common worry about current agricultural research is that it tends to focus on high-tech practices (fertilizers, pesticides, GM seeds, global positioning systems) that are likely to yield a great deal of profit for agribusiness. By focusing on these strategies, however, we may be failing to explore other practices that are likely to be less profitable for the big agricultural companies but that could be more environmentally and socially beneficial. Especially in developing countries, it may be unrealistic to expect farmers to employ the sorts of expensive inputs characteristic of most agriculture in the United States or Europe. State of the World 2011 provides fascinating reports of alternative agricultural strategies—often involving mixed cropping of legumes, cereal crops, and trees—that can increase yields significantly while strengthening depleted soils and keeping input costs at a reasonable level. To my mind, it is unfortunate that we do not direct more research at making these creative approaches as effective as possible.

Carl Cranor’s Legally Poisoned explores our selective ignorance in the context of environmental pollution. While I haven’t read the whole book yet, his main thesis seems fairly straightforward (and important!). He highlights the fact that U.S. law typically requires manufacturers to obtain very little information about the potential toxic properties of the synthetic chemicals that they incorporate in their products. Nevertheless, there is growing evidence that many of these chemicals can have worrisome effects on human neurological, immune, and reproductive systems, especially when we are exposed prenatally or as young children. It might seem that Cranor’s book provides a better example of flat-out ignorance about the effects of synthetic chemicals rather than selective ignorance. However, as I note in my own book, Is a Little Pollution Good for You?, both industry groups and government agencies fund a great deal of research designed to pinpoint the precise dose levels at which known toxins are harmful. Thus, we are making selective and socially significant choices to wrangle endlessly over how aggressively to regulate known toxins rather than choosing to perform more screening studies to identify unknown hazards.

Learn more about Kevin Elliott's Is a Little Pollution Good for You?.

--Marshal Zeringue

Imogen Robertson

Imogen Robertson is a writer based in London. Her first book Instruments of Darkness was published in the U.K. in May 2009, and is now available in America. Her second novel Anatomy of Murder comes out at the end of April 2010 in Britain.

Not so long ago I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I always have several books on the go at once. Some I will be reading for research, others for stimulation, others for pure pleasure. Here are some of the books which are open on the desk as I write, or in the pile by my reading chair in the living room.

I’m currently deep into Behind Closed Doors by Amanda Vickery. She’s without doubt one of the best historians of the Georgian age, and her work particularly fascinates me because she concentrates of the day to day lives of ordinary people, their domestic duties and concerns. It is that sort of social history I’ve always loved, rather than a timeline of battles and kings. She has found some amazing sources and used them to great effect so, more than anything, you get a sense of individual people, their voices and their lives. Just the sort of thing you need if you are writing fiction set in the period. Which I am.

There is always a volume of W. Somerset Maugham stories about the place somewhere. There are some writers you absorb in your youth and they become a part of you, part of your writer’s DNA and Somerset Maugham is one of those for me. His stories are chronicles of the British Empire in decline and full of betrayal, suppression, heat, fear, desire, yet for all that they have a restraint that seems to give them an added power. He is also line by line, one of the best prose stylists in English. The romance of these stories appealed to me as an adolescent, now I’m in awe of the craft. We all need something to aspire to.

And poetry. A week or two ago I went to the launch of two new pamphlets by the young English poets Ahren Warner, and Wayne Holloway-Smith, so I am reading them at the moment. The pamphlets are produced by Donut Press, and are like miniature artworks themselves. Beautiful objects. When I pick one of them up I’m convinced that e-readers will never take over entirely. Ahren’s book is full of ideas, dense allusion, a concrete experience of place. Reading the poems is like traveling Europe with a bottle of red wine in one hand and an exploding philosophical primer in the other. Wayne’s book is full of characters struggling with themselves and each other in poems that make the world seem slightly askew, slightly off-centre. It’s a world of magicians and performers, you can hear the phut of old camera flashes as you read. Wayne and Ahren are both old friends of mine, so I am annoyingly proud of them and keep recommending their books to strangers at bus stops.

I read a lot of crime fiction too. You can only write the sort of fiction you love to read, and it is a genre packed with great writers and great writing. At the moment Louise Welsh’s latest, Naming the Bones, is keeping me up nights. It’s the story of a rather lost young man, obsessed with a poet who died young while living on the remote Scottish Island of Lismore. The writing is terrific, you can feel the rain on your face as you read, and it has an edge of the gothic to it too, which is something that always draws me in as a writer and as a reader. Actually, I think I might sneak off to the living room and finish it now…

Visit Imogen Robertson's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Instruments of Darkness.

--Marshal Zeringue

Louise Dean

Louise Dean's novels include Becoming Strangers, which was awarded the Betty Trask Prize in 2004 and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award, This Human Season, and The Idea of Love. She lives in Kent, England.

Her new novel is The Old Romantic.

A few weeks ago I asked Dean what she was reading.  Her reply:

I hesitate to say ‘writers’ because when writers write ‘writers’ maybe they ought to put‘people’, but in any case writers and people both think a great deal about ‘honesty’. And they think about it most keenly when starting out. They tend to think of it as an act of God or a natural disaster with life changing consequences, and certainly that’s got literary appeal, but as one gets older in life and in writing, I think you realize that honesty is more like the ill-willed sibling or sour stepmother who somehow improves you by showing you how shabby you are, repeatedly.

Anyhow, many writers kick off with dying as a plot device. I know I did. You imagine, you see, that people get ‘honest’ as they draw close to the veil. That’s why I gave my Belgian man pancreatic cancer and the chance to see ‘clearly’. Of course, Faulkner ennobled the idea in As I Lay Dying but there’s life in this classic young writer's plot device yet. And Paul Harding’s Tinkers bagged a Pulitzer with it. I started it a couple of weeks ago but have left it about a third of the way in. I wasn’t surprised to read that he hailed from the Iowa Writers Workshop. You can tell a good workshop alumnus in the deliberate obscurantism in the writing, the quaint particularism of the details and references. If you’ve played the game ‘Balderdash’ and you should, then you’ll know that most of us are duped by anything highly particular. I admired the book somewhat, but it left me cold, so I set it aside. It was very decent of him to make something quite poetic so short. Maybe next time he could make it less poetic. Gerbrand Bakker, in The Twin handles the old man’s dying with terse ill will and I enjoyed it much more. His honesty was born of bearing a grudge. I think I like honesty best when it's a gun loaded and pointed at the writer. For that you have to love Tobias Wolff in The Old School which I read whilst the bath turned cold. It deals with the delusions and pretensions of young writers even whilst they try to pluck the flesh off the lying ribs of others. I thought the concept was fine, but perhaps I would.

In my first book, which dealt with a man dying of course, I quip that one person’s honesty, even if it's heartfelt, is a bit of an inconvenience or an imposition for another person. No one cares for it much, suspecting that the confession is booze fuelled or betokens lunacy or worse neediness, because all normal people get over being honest by eighteen. No good can come of it. And yet a writer who can know himself or herself, and use hate with the aplomb of affection, and present his or her own postmortem live on page after cringing page, is really a great writer. I just read Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing. The woman in the book, her first book, was clearly drawn from herself. It had to be - it’s how we start. You can only begin to write when you get that, and when you almost, not quite, but almost have got over yourself. The woman in The Grass is Singing is deluded, pretentious, hostile, selfish and dangerous. If books warn at all, it’s because they are more mirror than conduit. I’m getting a bit lofty - but what I want to say is: great book, and I’ll bet Lessing was a total bore in person.

Visit Louise Dean's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Old Romantic.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Stuckey-French

Elizabeth Stuckey-French is the author of a novel, Mermaids on the Moon, a collection of short stories, The First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa, and, with Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction: A Guide to the Narrative Craft.

Her new novel is The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady.

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

I read all kinds of stuff, but at the moment I’m reading, very slowly, War and Peace. I belong to a reading group connected with Books on the Nightstand, a fantastic weekly podcast about books and reading. As a group we’re reading War and Peace and supporting each other with a discussion board, pep talks, helpful related info, etc. I was always intimidated by the idea of reading it, but I’m finding the novel fascinating. The Peace part is all parties and social conventions and loveless marriage and politeness and luxurious homes, and the War part is horrid weather, chaos, randomness, maiming and death and nobody ever knows what the hell is going on. So far I like the War part better.

Visit Elizabeth Stuckey-French's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ty Roth

Ty Roth teaches literature and composition. He has studied the Romantic poets and enjoys teaching his students about them. He holds a Sociology degree from Xavier University and a Masters of English Literature from the University of Toledo. He lives with his family in Sandusky, Ohio, along the shores of his much-loved Lake Erie.

His new novel So Shelly was published last month by Delacorte Books for Young Readers.

A few weeks ago I asked Roth what he was reading. He replied with a short essay entitled "The Disease Called Life:"

My favorite novel of recent months has been Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed. The protagonist, Tim Farnsworth, is a successful New York City lawyer, who, despite the best efforts of both medical and psychiatric specialists to diagnose and treat his illness, finds himself plagued by a mysterious “disease” that strikes in intermittent phases and compels him to walk – for days, weeks, months, and eventually, years. In our GPS-obsessed world, Farnsworth walks with no destination in mind, nor does he walk for a purpose. There’s no “a-thon” attached to his walk. He walks for neither fitness nor weight loss. He walks because he has to. His addiction costs him the life of materialistic comfort he has earned, his career, his family, and ultimately any attachment to society. Regardless of this heavy price, he walks.

Ferris’s “unnamed” disease – which, he has explained, is a fabrication of his own imagination – is a simple yet poignant metaphor that operates on multiple layers. An obvious interpretation is that the reader, at least at first, empathizes with Farnsworth’s mid-life desire simply to leave behind all the choices made and responsibilities borne that have not lived up to the sense of fulfillment once thought inherent in them: spouses, family, career, adulthood, in general. However, by the story’s close, that reader is challenged to appreciate those very things in his/her own life and to confront the often destructive effects of walking away.

On another level, the walking is a clear metaphor for any all-consuming addiction, often inspired by healthy motives, that grows to Frankenstein’s monster proportions and turns on its onetime master: the sensible dieter who in his/her obsession with weight control contracts an eating disorder; the fitness freak whose once-healthy exercise routine now trumps all other concerns, activities, and people in his/her life; the social drinker who falls victim to alcoholism; the once recreational poker player or online investor who quits his steady job to chase the dream of fast, easy, and copious cash, etc. The examples are countless, but the outcomes frequently the same: ruin.

This leads to one more metaphorical interpretation of the walking; although, I have certainly not even come close to exhausting its potentialities. The collateral damage incurred due to Farnsworth walking is extensive. The fact is, Ferris illustrates, that none of us live in a vacuum in which the impact of our decisions and actions effect no one other than ourselves. Whether we like it or not, we do not possess the freedom to act in any manner that does not have immediate and often drastic outcomes for those in our work, social, and private lives.

For many readers on first thought, Ferris’s walking disease appears nonsensical, yet how often have we thought the same of a seemingly innocuous mole or swelling found cancerous? Perhaps it’s for all of us as the eighteenth-century English poet, Alexander Pope, described his own existence: “This long Disease, my life.” Despite our best efforts, life, including its responsibilities and absurdities, like an incurable disease, can only be accepted and endured not conquered and, most certainly, it cannot be walked away from simply.

Visit Ty Roth's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Hale

Benjamin Hale is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he received a Provost's Fellowship to write The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, which went on to win a Michener-Copernicus Award. He has been a night shift baker, a security guard, a trompe l'oeil painter, a pizza deliverer, a cartoonist, an illustrator and a technical writer. He grew up in Colorado and now lives in New York.

His new novel is The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore.

Last month I asked Hale what he was reading. His reply:

I just finished reading the collection of Saul Bellow’s letters that came out recently. I am a Bellow completist. Bellow is one of the few writers whose process and personal life I’m curious enough about to actually go out and read his letters. As far as getting into the nuts and bolts of writing fiction, they’re not as insightful as say, Flaubert’s famously are, but the characteristically cantankerous swagger and energy of his prose that’s in his letters as much as it’s in his fiction makes up for it. Typical to a collection of a writer’s letters, there’s plenty of bitching about money and woe-is-me-ing over catastrophic marriages, but there’s also a great deal of truly touching emotion—it’s particularly sad to watch Bellow’s sense of sympathy and uneasy foreboding grow over the course of his friendship with John Berryman.

There are only a few other writers whose work I’ve spent more time trying to reverse-engineer, to open up the hood and see what’s inside, try to figure out how it works. When I first seriously got into Bellow, I noticed there was something about the texture of his prose that felt completely different from the usual feeling of contemporary “literary” fiction. It isn’t that Bellow is old-fashioned. He’s not—there’s a relaxed wildness in his writing that’s thoroughly new-feeling: defensively American, erudite but colloquial, smart but distrustful of sophistry. After a lot of thought, I decided I’d realized what it was: here’s a writer who writes books as if they’re books, not TV shows. His prose effortlessly weaves in and out of “showing” and “telling.” He’ll circle over the world, drop in for a few disembodied lines of jangly dialogue and swoop back up again, float in the ether awhile, dive back down for an extended “scene” and in the next sentence advance time by a matter of months without slipping out of the paragraph, without breaking the rhythm. He lets a character talk as if he’s sitting across the dinner table from me. He speeds up time and slows it down as necessary, mixes the sacred with the profane, the concrete with the abstract, the general with the particular. The prose encompasses life as lived, given to us not in discrete, erratic snippets, but fully and fluidly. He is not a digital storyteller; he’s analog all the way. And it’s not visual, it’s oral: quite often Bellow doesn’t even bother describing where his characters are in space before they rattle off a few lines of dialogue—a quick stop on the bank, and then we’re back to rafting down the river of story. Augie March is just—talking. He’s talking to me. He’s not in a hurry, but he’s certainly not boring me, nor is he trying to present a perfectly transparent narrative window for me to gaze through without noticing the music of his words—and hearing his opinions, his digressions—a little philosophy here, a little politics there, a joke now and then—all the personality, that is, all the honest charisma of a human voice.

Learn more about The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore and its author at Benjamin Hale's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore.

--Marshal Zeringue

Priya Parmar

Priya Parmar, a former freelance editor and dramaturg holds degrees in English Literature and theatre. She attended Mount Holyoke College, Oxford University and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh. She divides her time between Hawaii and London.

Among the early praise for Exit the Actress, her debut novel:

“A real triumph…. A vivid imagining of the restoration London of Charles II with Nell Gwynn as a powerful and engaging heroine set in the busy world of the theater. This debut novel captures the glamorous world of the amoral court and the struggle of the city. Priya Parmar is a writer to watch.”
—Philippa Gregory, author of The Other Boleyn Girl

A few weeks ago I asked Parmar what she was reading. Her reply:

I am at that really good point in a really good book. You know that lovely place in a hefty, long book when you are well into it but still have hundreds of pages in front of you? It is such a clear sailing, comfy feeling to roam around that space. I am reading Sally Beauman’s Dark Angel just now and have three hundred pages behind me and four hundred ahead. Perfect.

It is evocative, consuming, edgy and gothic novel and I was not expecting to like it so much. I picked it up because it is set in WWI and I am trying to restrict my reading to things set in the first part of the twentieth century. It is a two pronged strategy to wean me off the addictive Restoration period where Exit the Actress is set and launch me into research for my untitled second novel. I keep getting pulled back to the Restoration as I have been missing Nell Gwyn and Charles II and the uproarious libertines terribly!

Visit Priya Parmar's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue