By the Book

by Pamela Paul

  Russia is a nightmarish authoritarian state, which is always good for some laughs. Satire always benefits when evil and stupidity collide, and Russia’s been a head-on collision for centuries. Vladimir Sorokin is currently my favorite Russian author, a distant heir of Nikolai Gogol, who wasn’t bad either.

  In addition to your books and short stories, you write for Travel & Leisure magazine. What, for you, is the appeal of travel writing? And who are your favorite travel writers?

  I love getting out of the country. My parents spent most of their lives living in the USSR, where travel to the West was impossible and Poland was as far as my mother ever got until we emigrated. Getting paid to travel seems completely insane, but there it is, one of the luckiest careers I’ve ever stumbled upon. As for favorite travel writers, Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar remains the Old Testament of the genre.

  What were your favorite books as a child? Are there any in particular you look forward to introducing your son to?

  When I was five, I read The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and the Wild Geese, by Selma Lagerlof. It was so inspiring I wrote my own version called Lenin and His Magical Goose, a hundred-page tome about Lenin encountering a socialist goose and conquering Finland together. It was commissioned by my grandmother, who paid for each page with a block of Soviet cheese. Even today, Random House pays me in cheese.

  My son might have less Bolshevik tastes than I did growing up, so I think it’s going to be all about this Seuss, MD, and his penchant for colored eggs.

  Which novels have had the most impact on you as a writer? Is there a particular book that made you want to write?

  See the question above.

  If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

  Definitely Don’t Bump the Glump!, by Shel Silverstein. It’s about how a great many creatures you encounter will try to eat you, even if you start out acting all bipartisan.

  What does your personal book collection look like? Do you organize your books in any particular way?

  No, it’s a mess! Russian books, American books, architecture books. I like how they form nice colors together. It’s important to talk to your books to remind them they still matter.

  You’ve become quite an avid presence on Twitter. Are there other authors you like to follow on Twitter or elsewhere online?

  So many! Among them @SalmanRushdie, @marykarrlit, @csittenfeld, @MargaretAtwood, @emilynussbaum, @CherylStrayed, @Mariobatali, @jenniferweiner, @judyblume, @JamesFrancoTV, @PGourevitch, @NathanEnglander, @plattypants (Adam Platt), @Rebeccamead_NYC, @susanorlean, @colsonwhitehead, @GilbertLiz (Elizabeth Gilbert), @JonathanAmes, @DavidEbershoff, @KBAndersen (Kurt Andersen), @SashaHemon, @jonleeanderson, @BananaKarenina (Elif Batuman), @walterkirn, @MollyRingwald, @John_Wray, @Tracy_Chevalier, @Darinstrauss, @mohsin_hamid, @michaelianblack, @JayMcInerney, @FrankBruni, @tejucole, @suketumehta, @AmyTan, @jacobwe (Jacob Weisberg), @EricAsimov, @poissel (Paul La Farge), @LukeBarr, @BretEastonEllis, @janiceylee, @askanyone (Sloane Crosley), @GarryShandling.

  Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

  As literary fiction’s foremost blurber, I will never publicly admit to disliking a book. Do you know how hard it is to write one? Every time I see a writer crying on the streets of Brooklyn, I give her a hug and nine bucks for a latte at Connecticut Muffin. We’re all in this together.

  What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?

  Dickens’s Bleak House. What’s wrong with me? On the other hand, I finished Middlemarch! So lay off me.

  Gary Shteyngart is the author of the novels Super Sad True Love Story, Absurdistan, and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. His most recent book is Little Failure: A Memoir.

  * * *

  I’d Prefer Not To

  There’s nothing I need or want to know from the writers I admire that isn’t in their books. It’s better to read a good writer than meet one.

  —John Irving

  I’m useless when I meet writers I love—I go slack-jawed and stupid with awe. So I’m happy, even in my fantasy life, to give the Great Ones their space. It’s enough to know them from what they put on the page.

  —Katherine Boo

  That way lies disaster. Books are writers’ way of becoming something else, something more, something greater. It might be that dinner with Dickens would be a disappointment. I’ve met some living writers who were just like their books, wonderfully, and others who ruined their books for me by being pompous and self-obsessed.

  —Anna Quindlen

  I adore the company of other writers, because they are so often lively minds and, frequently, blazingly funny. And of course we get each other in a unique way. (That’s probably a common feeling in all professions; certainly I know many lawyers who are bored by anybody who isn’t an attorney.) But I haven’t found my friendships with other writers to be especially revelatory about the literary process. Overall, I hold to the saying that “writers are better read than met,” meaning only that what makes them fascinating is on the page and not on their sleeves.

  —Scott Turow

  The idea of meeting writers of the books I’ve read doesn’t interest me. That is to say, I wouldn’t go out of my way. If the book is alive to me, if the sentences speak to me, that’s enough. A reader’s relationship is with the book, with the words, not with the person who created it. I don’t want the author to explain anything to me or to interfere.

  —Jhumpa Lahiri

  * * *

  Rachel Kushner

  What’s the best book you’ve read recently?

  Twelve Years a Slave, by Solomon Northup. An incredible document, amazingly told and structured. Tough, but riveting. The movie of it by Steve McQueen might be the most successful adaptation of a book ever undertaken; text and film complement each other wildly. I also recently read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and can’t quit promoting it. That and Golden Gulag, by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, are important books that assess with deep and careful thought how we came to be a society of mass incarceration of people of color.

  When and where do you like to read?

  My most recent, best reading experience was a vacation last summer that involved reading feverishly in a friend’s sixteenth-century stone cottage in the Corrèze, and doing the same in a cheap but airy hotel room overlooking the Corniche in Marseille. At home, I dedicate occasional whole days to reading as if I’m a convalescent. The ideal place for this is the bath, where the body floats free. Books go a little wavy, but they’re mine, so who cares. Currently I’m deep in Kippenberger: The Artist and His Families, in this manner. It’s very good. None of the usual biography clichés (“And yet his greatest disappointments were still to come.…”). And if you want to understand the art world, and cult of personality, it is a very instructive read.

  What books do you find yourself returning to again and again?

  I am a rereader. Quality is variety if you wait long enough. Barthes, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Céline, Duras, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Melville: There is so much to revisit. Ingrid Caven, by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, is always in rotation. I used to read Morvern Callar, by Alan Warner, every year—I adored that book. This past fall I reread the first two volumes of Proust (new Penguin translations). It was my third reread. I was teaching a Proust seminar at Syracuse, to MFA students of writing. To read for the purpose of leading a class called for a different way of looking at the volumes, more systematic. What I felt every week was that the system, the structure of metaphysical themes and concerns, was right there in the text, so natural to locate. In preparation I read, among other things, Edmund White’s sweet and short biography of Proust and was so impressed by it. Edmund White might be a rare person of letters in an old-fashioned sense.

  Who is your favorite novelist of all time?

  For all time, two: Marcel Proust and Marguerite Duras.

  Sell us on
your favorite overlooked or underappreciated writer.

  I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history, resulting in a life in which she worked as a maid and died in a welfare nursing home. She’s clever. She does something modern to the sentence. Her race politics (outlined in her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road) are a bit over my head, a bit strange, but fascinating. Alejo Carpentier is so important to me that I don’t know if he’s famous or not, he’s huge in my own private world of greats. The Lost Steps, The Chase (Sartre’s favorite), Reasons of State—his prose is spare and baroque at the same time, brutal and comic and full of historical rage and intricate human achievement. Kingdom of This World, about the Haitian Revolution, is a singular work of art. Famous in the hipper poetry circles but perhaps not the wider world, Ariana Reines is something special, and her book Mercury is a shining achievement. I revere it.

  What kinds of stories are you drawn to? And how would you describe the kinds of books you steer clear of?

  I steer clear of books with ugly covers. And ones that are touted as “sweeping,” “tender,” or “universal.” But to the real question of what’s inside: I avoid books that seem to conservatively follow stale formulas. I don’t read for plot, a story “about” this or that. There must be some kind of philosophical depth rendered into the language, something happening. I am often drawn to works that are significant to either the modernist project or to France in the nineteenth century or twentieth century and contemporary Latin America, and lately I read about race in America, because it’s an enormous unanswered question. But I’ll read about any world if it’s rendered with originality, in a good-ugly or severe way. Or in a beautiful way, but free of sentimentality and predictability. And if a book is humorless, I want it to be as good as José Saramago. That about sums it up!

  What kinds of characters draw you in as a reader? And as a writer?

  I tend to like the complicated antihero: Charlus, from Proust. Balzac’s Vautrin. Bolaño’s Hans Reiter/Archimboldi, in 2666. Shrike, from Miss Lonelyhearts. The Judge from Blood Meridian. Recktall Brown from The Recognitions. If I could write a character like one of those? Well. I should be so lucky.

  Which books might we be surprised to find on your bookshelves?

  Maybe those in my country and western section—the Larry McMurtry novels, an amazing picture book of the Grand Ole Opry, and a history of frontier prostitution lamentably titled Soiled Doves. Also, I have always collected books on cars and racing. I have a book that’s just a glossary of terms from the world of gas dragsters, and another on the Czech-built Tatra, the most beautiful make of car the world has ever seen. And I am a completist about the photo books of the “porn auteur” Elmer Batters. If only I collected books on marijuana I could have a shelf called “Ass, Gas, or Grass: Nobody Reads for Free.”

  What kind of reader were you as a child?

  Supposedly I went into my room with Alice in Wonderland, which was given to me when I was five, and didn’t come out until I was done. I was an early reader but I don’t think that says much. Having a child and being around them, it’s apparent to me that there’s some kind of clock that goes off at different times for different kids. Mine went off early, and I didn’t like to sleep. So my mother let me stay up as late as I wanted looking at books, and she says I stayed up all night doing that starting at age three. My best years are way behind me.

  What were your favorite childhood books? Do you have a favorite literary character?

  I got all my politics and culture and my sense of the great wide world of adults from Mad magazine. But all other comic books literally gave me a headache. I loved Island of the Blue Dolphins, Julie of the Wolves, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. I still think of that moment at the end of Island of the Blue Dolphins when Karana is rescued and the seaman gives her a coarse dress made of denim coveralls to make her “decent.” Later, fourth or fifth grade, I remember being obsessed with My Ántonia, by Willa Cather; devastated by the brave demise of McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; and crushed out on Pappadopoulis, the bohemian Odysseus of Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, by Richard Fariña.

  What children’s books have you enjoyed discovering (or rediscovering) through your six-year-old son?

  We read a lot of books that were mine when I was little, saved all these years: Higglety Pigglety Pop!, by Maurice Sendak. The Wedding Procession of the Rag Doll and Broom Handle, by Carl Sandburg, illustrated by Harriet Pincus. The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine, by Donald Barthelme. Tolstoy’s Fables and Folktales for Children—so simple, and wonderful, if slightly dark. They remind me that a children’s story doesn’t need to pander in order to entertain. (The problem with so much recent children’s literature: it panders, and yet is often inappropriate for children.) Two new discoveries that are profound works of children’s literature: Paddle-to-the-Sea, by Holling C. Holling, and The Animal Family, by Randall Jarrell.

  Which novels have had the most impact on you as a writer?

  I studied the novels of Joan Didion and Don DeLillo, who seemed deft and worldly in a way I hoped to someday be. More recently, I have grown deeply impressed by the verve and erudition of The Recognitions, by William Gaddis. It is a work that, to me, fulfills the ambition to apprehend the writer’s own moment as history—that is the goal, to my mind. I don’t care to read about present-day America unless the writer truly has something to say about these times—uses the contemporary, rather than gets used by it. The whole idea of “offering up a mirror” is not enough. I want more.

  Is there a particular book that made you want to write?

  Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is without question the book that made me want to try to be a fiction writer as an actual serious undertaking.

  If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

  Given who our president is, this is like a trick question. I have serious problems with Obama. But Obama is not poorly read; that is not his problem. He’s extremely well read. He’s still got a drone program. He lets bankers run our economy. Allows Guantánamo to remain open. It would be foolish to pretend I could recommend some enlightening text and he’d scratch his chin and then go for a policy makeover.

  What does your personal book collection look like? Do you organize your books in any particular way?

  Subject areas for nonfiction. Literature is alphabetical, except I keep poetry on its own set of shelves, but some poets go with fiction for reasons that remain mysterious to me, such as Anne Carson, Francis Ponge, Rimbaud. And I have a “hot” bookcase where I keep what I’m looking at for a novel I’m writing. On the fiction shelves, in front of more dormant areas, I place images of girls and women reading, maybe that’s precious, it’s just a habit that got started at some point: postcards of paintings by, for instance, Tamara de Lempicka, Gerhard Richter, Lucian Freud, and Cindy Sherman as ingénue-librarian, reaching up.

  Disappointing, overrated, just not good: Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

  I set aside books without finishing them all the time, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t like them. Take, recently, Living Currency, by Pierre Klossowski, or the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or Xenophon’s Anabasis—I dip in, and in thirty pages I have a taste of something important that I don’t have the training to really benefit from reading to completion anyhow. For years all I’d read of Ulysses was the first hundred pages plus the Molly Bloom soliloquy, and nevertheless I had the audacity to still consider myself an admirer of that work. Later I read the whole thing, but in that earlier time, it was much better to have read some of it than none of it.

  What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?

  There are various major works I have not read—Anna Karenina, The Red and the Black, The Betrothed. But nothing I am embarrassed not to have yet read. Reading widely and deeply is crucial, I constantly read, but knowing every important work of literature
, if you want to be a novelist, is not required and could even hinder things. A writer is someone who can ask questions and follow bold instincts of assimilation. A vast intellectual, someone incredibly erudite about the entire canon, might have more difficulty doing so.

  Rachel Kushner is the author of The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank four groups of people. First, at The New York Times, I want to thank Sam Tanenhaus, for hiring me first as children’s book editor, then as features editor, and for giving me big shoes to fill at the Book Review. I am hugely grateful to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Dean Baquet, Bill Keller, Jill Abramson, and Janet Elder for their tremendous leadership, encouragement, and support at the Times. At the Book Review, I’ve had the pleasure and honor to work with a great team of people: Bob Harris, David Kelly, Alex Star, Jenny Schuessler, Barry Gewen, Alida Becker, Jen McDonald, Greg Cowles, Parul Sehgal, Jen Szalai, Sarah Smith, John Williams, Blake Wilson, Steve Coates, Elsa Dixler, Ihsan Taylor, Amy Rowland, Doug Sanders, Valencia Prashad, Jude Biersdorfer, Francis Mateo, Jeffrey Hanson-Scales, and our art director, Nicholas Blechman, who makes By the Book—and every issue, every week—look so distinctive.

  I want to thank those who worked specifically on this book: Alex Ward, for helping shepherd this project. My terrific agent, Lydia Wills, as always. Scott Turow, a great champion of books and their authors, for writing a lovely foreword to the book. And Jillian Tamaki, the talented illustrator who creates portraits each week for the column, beautifully reproduced in the book and on its cover.

  At Henry Holt, Paul Golob, whose meticulous reading and edits both awe me and put me to shame. Emi Ikkanda, mistress of organization. Everyone I’ve worked with at Holt has been terrific: Stephen Rubin, Gillian Blake, Pat Eisemann, Maggie Richards, and the entire sales team. And Meryl Levavi, Rick Pracher, and Molly Bloom, who gave the book its great look and brought it out on schedule.