ЛИТЕРАТУРНЫЙ ЖУРНАЛ ФАНТАСТИКИ
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“I Know How to Cook,” by Ginette Mathiot, perhaps? I periodically bring this massive book out to the kitchen in a wheelbarrow, winch it onto the counter and go through its pages looking for a new experience to inflict upon my wife, Ann. I can make a good chicken Marengo, and a trout recipe, but many of the other attempts are best not replicated or remembered.

What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?

My high school creative writing teacher, Denise Standiford, gave me a copy of Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber” and said I needed to read it. She was right — I didn’t know until then that you could write like that. I felt as if my brain was exploding with each sentence, in the best possible way.

Do books serve a moral function, in your view? How so?

I enjoy books that don’t care if I think they should serve a moral function. Personally, I believe it’s more important that books be laboratories and experiments and it’s up to the reader to be moral. I trust my readers to know that, at times, I’m going to write wickedly and in a messed-up way, about messed-up characters who may behave in an unreliable or suspect manner.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

Given a year of strict quarantine because of the virus, there are so many living writers I want to see and talk to, in such desperate ways. But, for that very reason, I’ll restrict myself to dead writers. Personally, I think a dinner party with Leonora Carrington, Angela Carter and Amos Tutuola would be amazing. These would not be the only guests, but I will not name the others out of deference to your outrageous limit.

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

I’m afraid my answer may be disappointing or just not good, because the past year I’ve abandoned dozens of books as if they were radioactive hot potatoes. Permission to fail in reading texts entire seemed important, given election and pandemic stress. We need to be charitable toward books we don’t connect with for this reason. I’ve been astonished to return to certain books the past month that I thought were slow reads, only to discover that my own pacing was at fault.

I will admit, though, that I am on my sixth chance with “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Every time I start from the beginning again, I manage 20 to 30 new pages of progress. Every time, too, I have some new think-piece about it that changes my perception. Someday I will make it to the end, and I won’t regret it (although, maybe?) even though to say I’m fond of this novel would be a stretch. It’s OK to be bored, confused, frustrated and irritated by a book every once in a while, so long as there’s also something you glimpse in the pages that’s mysterious or new or different. (My parents gave me “The Lord of the Rings” when I was 9, too young to understand all of it, so this has always been part of what I think of as a good reading experience.)

What do you plan to read next?

Since it’s spring, Ali Smith’s “Autumn,” the first few pages of which are already revelatory and liberating.

https://www.nytimes.com/

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