Author Bookshelf
by K-Ming Chang, October 24, 2023 9:34 AM
The journey of writing Organ Meats was far from linear; it was more like the patchwork process of creating a quilt. Foraging from inherited histories, oral stories, and inspirational texts, I conceived of this novel as a vessel for collectives of women. The two girls at the center of the novel, Anita and Rainie, are haunted by a chorus of feral dogs who narrate their hungry ancestry, giving voice to generations of deferred desire. As always, I was inspired by writers in translation. In their hands, the form...
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Author Bookshelf
by Rachel Harrison, September 21, 2023 9:19 AM
Bookshelf organization is deeply personal. Some prefer by genre, by content, others by aesthetic attributes like color and size. I like to put books together that I think would be friends, that would get along or at least wouldn’t mind being neighbors. Books with protagonists that could maybe commiserate while they begrudgingly appear in the back of my Zoom calls or TikToks. In my imagination, my bookshelf is a bar, and the characters are all having a drink, swapping stories, gossiping to and about...
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Author Bookshelf
by Hilary Leichter, August 29, 2023 9:20 AM
Terrace Story is a novel about a terrace that spontaneously appears (and disappears) in a very small apartment. It’s also about future memory, reverse hope, and what life feels like when it somehow moves adjacent to chronology. And so I knew from the start (or was it the finish?) that time would travel through my drafts in funny ways. There were specific moments in the book that found their origin in emotions I had felt before...
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Author Bookshelf
by Lydia Kiesling, August 1, 2023 9:38 AM
When I started writing Mobility, I was interested in describing life from the perspective of a teenage girl in a place that’s unfamiliar to her, applying her fairly stereotypical teen interests to a very adult setting — the oil rush in newly independent Azerbaijan in the late 1990s, when representatives of multinational oil companies and freelance mercenaries flooded the former Soviet Union to capitalize on the spoils of its dissolution. Over time, a story about a teenage summer became a vehicle to explore the world of oil and gas through an oblique, fictional vantage. I read a lot of books about fossil fuels to research Mobility....
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Author Bookshelf
by Sarah Rose Etter, July 11, 2023 9:36 AM
When you’re drafting a novel, you must be very careful. Whatever you read can cause an existential crisis. All of your ideas and confidence can get thrown into a pit as you spiral over the idea that you should have written a book just like the one you are reading, not the one you are writing. So before I write a novel, I pull together a small stack of the books I want to be in conversation with and read those over and over again. By the time I’m in the later stages of editing, I can usually weave...
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Author Bookshelf
by Claire Fuller, June 6, 2023 9:00 AM
Sometimes in the middle of writing a novel, including The Memory of Animals, I suddenly feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. Not the usual pervading feeling of not knowing what I’m doing, which is a constant companion I’ve learned to live with, but a panicky feeling of being adrift. It’s not so much the story and where it’s going, but rather the style of my writing, the voice, the language I’m using. What I do then is turn to a book that has the sound that I’m aiming for and I open it at a random page...
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Author Bookshelf
by Theodore McCombs, May 30, 2023 8:29 AM
Reality, even at its worst, is too polite to say everything that needs saying. The permission of speculative fiction is to reach above the merely plausible for those high shelves of meaning. That’s also the promise of queer fiction: we’re not bound to repeat the common wisdoms, we can offer an outside perspective. My debut collection Uranians tries to make good on both those potentials, and while writing it, I turned often to these books to reinspire me toward that goal....
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Author Bookshelf
by Jenny Fran Davis, May 26, 2023 10:09 AM
I read a wide range of literature, from “chick lit” to heady nonfiction, and when I love a book, I begin to think of it as a friend. It also inspires me in one way or another: its tone, its sensibility, its cadence, its structure, or its voice. The following books are spiritually entwined with Dykette and belong on the same shelf because I think of each one as a friend to my novel — not necessarily aligned in every way, or identical in style, but with a shared sense of humor, a social ease, an ability to gossip about the same people, shared references, an affinity for the same types of restaurants....
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Author Bookshelf
by Anna Metcalfe, April 13, 2023 9:21 AM
Photo credit: Sophie Davidson
Alongside commonplace narratives around self-transformation — an insistent vein of thought around how to optimize our work, our bodies, or our economic prospects—there exists a different, more passive kind of metamorphosis. It’s the kind that happens to you, rather than being decided by you. It might arise by way of a person, a book, a film, a good meal, or a couple of paintings in the Getty Research Institute. Unlike the drive to optimize, it requires empty time and goalless attention. These are books that helped me to think about the things that change us, as...
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Author Bookshelf
by Sophie Mackintosh, April 6, 2023 9:19 AM
When I was writing Cursed Bread — a novel set in 1951s France, loosely based on a true historical event — I wasn’t able to go to France itself. Instead I wrote most of it during lockdown 2020, in a UK heatwave. No doubt this added to the claustrophobic feeling of the book, and it also meant I had more time to read, though admittedly, like so many of us, my reading experience during that time was mixed. I found myself gravitating to books set in France for obvious reasons, but also to old favorites...
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