GRANT FAULKNER

Grant is Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. His stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, The Southwest Review, PANK, Gargoyle, eclectica, and Puerto del Sol, among dozens of other journals. His collection of one hundred 100-word stories, Fissures, was released in 2015. Find out more about Grant and his work on his website.

The interesting thing about my reading life is how messy and sprawling it’s gotten. When I was younger, I seemed to read with greater focus, reading only two or three books at a time, and reading them much more quickly than I do now.

I don’t think “messy” and “sprawling” have to carry negative connotations, though. The sprawl is good because I’m curious, so my reading is wide-ranging and somewhat unbridled. Perhaps more importantly, I’m increasingly moody, so I need to have a variety of books in motion to match the finicky needs of my odd and unpredictable states.

As a result, I have several stacks of books, all contending to be read, like children asking for a parent’s attention. These are the books that have made it out of the confines of a small bookshelf I purchased solely to prioritize the books to be read next on my list. I wonder if there will someday be a structure for yet another tier of books classified as “to be read after the ‘to be read’ books are read.”

Some of the books in my pile will be read and read again. Some paged through and dismissed. Some will never be read, or I’ll reach out for them just as I die, and say, “But...”

Books that accompany me to the front porch on moody Saturday mornings:

I like to drift on Saturday mornings. That first hour of the day is somewhat sacred because I know it will soon be eclipsed by life concerns, whether it’s a child’s soccer game or even the business of writing. I want my thoughts to traipse gently, and without any determined direction, like the fog that I’ll sometimes find on one of the perfect mornings when I stow myself away on the bench on the front porch.

So I read things that inspire drifting. I’ve been reading Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems — both because it’s the 50th anniversary of the book and because I like the curious meandering of O’Hara’s mind as he walks about town noticing things. I’ve spent many a lunch in my lifetime trying to reclaim the poetry of my mind on a dreary day of work.

John Berryman’s Dream Songs also often accompanies me. I’d initially planned to read one dream song a day this year (there are 385), but my peripatetic reading style took over, so it might be more of a two-year project.

And then I’ll often wisp through A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes, picking up an idea or a phrase to riff on in my journal. Barthes is perfect to drop in and out of. I’m almost always reading something by Barthes.

The books in my satchel:

These are the books of the day, the books that accompany me on commuter trains and trips.

I decided that re-reading is as important as reading books for the first time (and perhaps more important), so I’m now re-reading Tender is the Night, my favorite book by Fitzgerald. I haven’t read it in 25 years or so, and since it’s a novel partly about the passing of youth, I thought it would be interesting to inhabit Dick Diver’s demise now that I’m an older man.

I recently got the fortuitous chance to spend an evening with Peter Coyote, a remarkable man of much wisdom and many experiences. I’m reading his memoir, The Rainman’s Third Cure, which explores his life and his mentors. We can never have enough mentors, and it’s an interesting exercise to identify and reflect on my own mentors.

And then I try to keep one book on writing going at all times, so I’ve been re- reading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. It’s a comforting book for a writer like me, who doesn’t expect to make any money from writing, but approaches it with almost religious purpose.

The books that go on for years:

I love books about alcoholic writers. If I were abandoned on a deserted island and had to choose a short list of books, they’d all be by and about that wonderful pantheon of gloriously reckless and doomed alcoholic scribes. Someday I’d like to teach a course on novels written by alcoholics.

I just finished Cheever: A Life, Blake Bailey’s amazing biography of John Cheever. I’m now reading Cheever’s letters, the collection of all of his short stories, and I plan to read his journals, of course.

I’ve heard it said that writers nurture their anguish, burnishing it daily with their words. That anguish can be such a strange friend or enemy, an endlessly interesting spiritual center. Cheever held such anguish, a secret that guided and crippled him. Yet perhaps it also made life a much more interesting affair.

Books that taunt me:

If I ever read Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, I should treat myself to a trip to Paris. Or perhaps I should treat myself to a trip to Paris just to read it. It’s been staring at me for years.

It seems unlikely that I’ll read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I’d like to take a poll of the number of people who own Infinite Jest and have read it. I think the percentage would be low.

I wonder how I can die without reading Proust. That defines the injustice of life, that I might die without reading Proust. But there he is, waiting, whispering that there will never be a perfect time to read him, so I should read him now.

The books that are next:

After Tender Is the Night, James Salter’s Light Years awaits re-reading. I’ve heard Virginia Woolf’s The Waves described as a prose poem, and I’m very interested in thinking of the novel as a prose poem because that seems to be the way I’m most inclined to write.

On that note, I can’t wait to read Peter Matthiesen’s Far Tortuga, a story pieced together in fragments. And then there’s Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, written in a similar manner. Since I write flash fiction, and am increasingly drawn to an aesthetic of brevity, I plan to write a novel that is essentially a collection of little shards pieced together.

WENDY FOX

Wendy’s debut, The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories, won the Press 53 award for short fiction, and her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Washington Square, The Pinch, ZYZZYVA, The Tusculum Review, The Puritan, and many other literary journals. Her novel, Deals, is forthcoming from Underground Voices in 2016. She lives in Denver.

You can find out more about Wendy on her website and Twitter.

I’m a bad bedtime reader — I get started and then wake up later with the light still on and my glasses mashed against my face, the book open to the same page, now dented and drooled on. Still, I like the bedtime stack because it’s the last thing I see before sleep and the first thing I see when waking up. If I am going to really read it, the book needs to migrate out to daylight. Here are the ones that have recently made it:

Midge Raymond, Forgetting English — This was a re-read. Forgetting English came out from Press 53 in 2011, and just after it hit, a friend (the poet and essayist Janée J. Baugher) scanned one of the stories and emailed it to me with a note that implored me to read the rest. I took her advice, and recently, when I was working through some new stories of my own, I revisited this collection. Raymond’s writing is so clean, and I admire how she weaves elements of corporate life into elements of the natural world. In particular, “The Ecstatic Cry” — the story my friend first scanned — is a standout; I mean, how do you set something in Antarctica and have it ring true? Raymond handles the setting and the characters so deftly, you feel like you too could learn to love the cold.

Polly Buckingham, The Florida Review — This fiction chap book is 60-ish pages from The Florida Review. What I admire about Buckingham’s prose is the extreme attention to detail, and that the detail is always doing (at least) double duty. Here’s one of my favorite passages because so much happens and we learn so much in the space of a few sentences:

When he’d first visited his parents after her death, his father had given him a box full of his old tools. There were well cared for antiques, their wood handles worn from use, and they worked with greater precision than most pricey new tools. He’d wept in his father’s workshop, the most orderly room he’d ever known, surrounded by the sweet smell of sawdust, the metal table with forty tiny labeled drawers, and the old wooden paper cutter Charlie had loved as a child. His father held up gracefully against his tears. He put another log in the woodstove, handed Charlie a cup of black coffee, and they sat in silence listening to the crackling of the fire.

Maybe it’s not fair to make these four sentences speak for the whole work—which is why it is worth reading the rest of it.

Gregory Spatz, Inukshuk — I didn’t read this when it first came out in 2012, but I read it on a long plane ride after I saw in the news that one of the ships from a mid-1800s expedition in the Northwest Passage had been discovered by the Canadian government. The HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus, caught in the arctic ice along with the men who sailed them, are the backdrop for the novel. I loved this book because Spatz is able to ground a desperate, terrifying journey with contemporary characters, and it successfully balances a very fine line between commercial and literary fiction. Since finishing it, I keep waiting to hear news of someone selling the screenplay. The images from the discovered shipwreck are haunting, but Spatz’s novel is just as visual, paired with spot-on dialogue and a family with just the right amount of mess.

John Keeble, The Shadows of Owls — I’ve hardly cracked this book, but so far it reads like vintage Keeble — I feel like his characters are always set at the scalding point, in the sense of how the word is used in cooking: that controlled space just before a boil. In the opening, we meet Kate, and I suspect she may keep me up all night.

CLIFFORD GARSTANG

Clifford is the editor of Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, a new anthology from Press 53. He won the 2013 Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction for his novel in stories What the Zhang Boys Know (2012). He is also the author of a story collection, In an Uncharted Country (2009), and the editor of Prime Number Magazine. After receiving a BA in Philosophy from Northwestern University, Garstang served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Korea. He earned an MA in English and a JD, both from Indiana University, and practiced international law in Singapore, Chicago, and Los Angeles with one of the world’s largest law firms. Subsequently, he earned a Master of Public Administration from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and worked as a legal reform consultant in Almaty, Kazakhstan. From 1996 to 2001, he was Senior Counsel for East Asia at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. He holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and currently lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

Check out Clifford’s website. Find out more about Everywhere Stories on Facebook.

At any one time, I have a lot of books going and many more waiting in the wings. So what’s on that list right now?

I’m currently reading The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert. This is a frightening presentation of the disastrous effects humans have had on the planet. By now we all know about the asteroid that crashed into the earth and caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs and many other species. Basically, humans are having the same kind of impact as that asteroid. That’s not a cheery thought, but it’s a fascinating book.

I’m also reading The Great Glass Sea by Josh Weil. I’ve known Josh for a while, and we did a joint reading several years ago when our first books came out. This book is terrific — set in a near-future Russia, about two brothers and the consequences of orbiting mirrors that bring constant sunlight to a vast greenhouse. The language is pure poetry, and so far at least the story is extremely engaging.

While I’m on the subject of fiction, I’m also in the middle of an audio version of The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren, which won the National Book Award in 1950. It’s a gritty drug-scene story set in post-war Chicago. It’s great for the dialogue alone.

I often have one book of poetry going, also, and that right now is Memory Chose a Woman’s Body by Angela M. Carter. Angela is in a writers’ group that I facilitate and her poetry is confessional, unflinching, and usually a bit dark. She says that poetry saved her life, and you really get that feeling from reading the poems.

I also usually have a book of philosophy or spirituality going as well, and now I’m reading A. J. Ayer’s The Problem of Knowledge. I read some of this in college, too, and it’s every bit as dense as I remember it being, but I’m a big fan of logic and understanding the difference between facts and beliefs, so this is right up my alley. Plus — although it sounds a little odd — it’s research for a novel I’m working on.

Let me also mention a few good books I’ve recently finished that haven’t yet found their way to a spot on the bookshelves (assuming I can find some room):

Dust to Dust by Benjamin Busch is a memoir that spans his childhood (Busch is the son of beloved novelist and short story writer Frederick Busch) and his military service in Iraq. I enjoyed the book for its candor and its structure, which is built around basic elements — water, metal, soil, bone, and so on.

Another recent non-fiction read that I admired was Whistling Vivaldi by Claude M. Steele. Steele is a social psychologist who has long studied the way in which “stereotype threat” (basically the fear of confirming negatives about one’s group, especially gender and racial stereotypes) creates a performance gap that can be mitigated with appropriate cues and a supportive environment. Apparently, it’s that easy.

I also recently finished a historical novel by Maud Casey, The Man Who Walked Away, set in the early days of European psychoanalysis and dealing with the peculiar relationship between a doctor and his patient, a man who frequently wakes up to discover that he’s wound up in some unfamiliar city.

And the last poetry book I read was Until You Make the Shore by Cameron Conaway, which I picked up and had signed by the author at the AWP Conference earlier this year. The collection stands out because it is in the voices of four young women in a juvenile correctional facility where Conaway once taught. It should be performed as theater (as I’ve told the author).

Which leaves the books I’m looking forward to next:

I just got a copy of a collection of stories by Elizabeth Kadetsky (mysteriously identified only as “Kadetsky” on the cover) called The Poison that Purifies You that looks really intriguing. With many of the stories being set abroad, it’s just the kind of thing I enjoy.

I’ve been meaning also to read The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson, which won the Pulitzer Prize. It’s set in North Korea and because I lived in South Korea for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the ’70s, I’m sure to find this one really interesting. (And, I have a novel set partly in Korea that my agent is trying to sell.) So that’s the next novel I’ll tackle.

My book club is reading Dr. Carl Hart’s High Price, which is a neuroscientist’s book about drug addiction — from someone who has been there, apparently. I’m looking forward to that one.

This bedside book list is like peeking into someone’s medicine cabinet and finding the perfect prescription for years worth of great reading.

— Sandra Cisneros, internationally renowned author of The House on Mango Street and other beloved books

They say the third time's the charm and Best of Books by the Bed #3 proves it to be true! Another magical collection of the books sitting on our favorite authors' bedside tables, and most intriguing, why they've chosen them — and why you should, too! The Olsens are quickly becoming the literary kingdom's king and queen of book recommendations!

— Sarah McCoy, New York Times and international bestselling author of The Mapmaker's Children and The Baker's Daughter

It’s like eavesdropping on the most literary water cooler gossip ever . . .

— Joe Haldeman, author of The Forever War and other award-winning science fiction

Best of Books by the Bed #3 is like a voyeuristic journey into the private lives of writers who freely tell us with whom they are crawling into bed. You won’t find a monogamous reading-writer in the bunch, and I say, Good for them! Good for us all! Here’s an opportunity to find out who some of your favorite authors keep within arm’s length of their pillows, and you are sure to discover new authors who share your own literary affections that could lead you to a new stack of bedmates. What a great idea for a book: great reading that leads to even more great reading!

— Kevin Morgan Watson, Publisher, Press 53

A privileged glimpse into the bedrooms and reading proclivities of writers, Best of Books by the Bed #3 is a marvelous, handy, wide-ranging resource, full of mind-jogging suggestions — and four significant omissions.

— Michelle Huneven, author of 1. Round Rock, 2. Jamesland, 3. Blame, and 4. Off Course