Johannes Göransson, On Reading

"I read about things that fascinate me. Of course they can fascinate in many different ways, many of them unwholesome, possibly even detrimental. Right now I'm translating Swedish poet Aase Berg's second book, Mörk Materia (or Dark Matter, due out in translation from Black Ocean next year). Here's something I just translated (provisional):

'The tentacle city glitters in a chain of streetlights and flicker globes. There pinheads jump around and pick sticky pionees. But Saskia in silk sinks down in the Ylajali River’s skin-blue whirls. The moraine-eels suck her stretched-out [inflated?] arteries. Moraine eels in a wreath of unmentionable water angles.'

That's just my rough draft. But that's what I'm reading this afternoon in Indiana. If anyone is interested, in August, I'm starting a new blog with some friends - it's called Montevidayo. It will be dedicated to reading."


{Johannes Göransson is the author of several books of poetry/prose and the translator of several books of Swedish poetry. He is the co-editor of Action Books and the online journal Action, Yes. He teaches at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.}

Aimee Bender, On Reading

"Reading. First off, it's incredibly intimate. Me, and the writer, meeting on the page. Paul Auster has a great line, something like 'writer and reader make the book, both' and I think that's a beautiful way of stating it. There's a duet in play. Part of my job, in reading, is to try to take in what the writer has put on the page, to bring enough of myself to it so that something activates.

Reading is often a non-linear experience for me. I'll race ahead a few pages to get a tiny sense of what's to come if I can't stand waiting. Then I'll go back, slow myself down, sometimes going extremely slowly, to get there. When I'm reading a book I love, I'll often read the lines twice as I go to take them in. I slow myself down again, to make sure I'm aware of what I'm reading. Sometimes it's too much. It depends on my general level of concentration. Also, my eye darts around, going to the bottom of the page, the top, reversing, back forward.

I did a map of this once for the journal Ecotone, it's the third map:

'Three Maps' (Ecotone, Volume 2, Number 1: Fall/Winter 2006).

If I'm reading a book where the language doesn't really move me, I'll read very fast, and sometimes it's nice to take a break like this and read a thriller or a cop book just to read for plot alone, because reading as a writer is often a painstaking process. A very meaningful one, but a slow one. It took me months to read Marilynne Robinson's book Home. A couple pages a day, sometimes.

That said, I also read for how the words look on the page, and Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein is a joy to read because it's so strange and funny and fresh and exciting, but also because it looks so great. The words just look really good together."


{Aimee Bender is the author of four books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) which was a NY Times Notable Book, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) which was an L.A. Times pick of the year, Willful Creatures (2005) which was nominated by The Believer as one of the best books of the year, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010). She has received two Pushcart prizes, and was nominated for the TipTree award in 2005, and the Shirley Jackson short story award in 2010. Her fiction has been translated into ten languages. For more information, visit her website here.}

Sumanth Prabhaker, On Reading

"I know I must have read at least some books when I was little, because the public library in our city had really good air conditioning during the summers, so we were there all the time. My parents would sit in adjacent armchairs, reading periodicals and different newspapers, and my brother and I would be told to wander around until it was time for lunch. I know I read a lot because there wasn't much else to do in the library, at the time, and I know I loved many of those books, but I have very few memories of actually reading -- actually going up to a shelf and selecting something and finding a clean place to sit and read. It's really only the stories that I remember, like I just at certain points added their content to my brain.

When I remember first being very conscious of the act of reading were the few times my parents took me to visit their parents in India. Down the road from my father's parents' house was a little lending library made of scrap aluminum siding, three walls and a kind of roof, and the owner sat outside on a wooden stool. My father, a stranger to jetlag, would get up early during these trips and eat idlis at the table with his parents while my mother got herself out of bed, and my brother and I would walk down the dirt road and see what was to be had at the lending library that day. You could probably fit three full-sized people in there if they all stood facing the same direction. I don't know how this can be true, but I remember using empty Coke bottles in some kind of transaction for the books I got. I remember getting these books and taking them back to the house with me and I remember reading them way up close to the electric fan, which my grandparents brought out specially for me during these visits: the Famous Five and Secret Seven, Asterix and Obelix, and as much Tintin as my arms could carry.

Before they were collected in the hardcover editions seen in most bookstores now, Tintin comics were oversized and thin and a little unwieldy to hold; they were always there, on the walk back to my grandparents' house, and spread out on the carpet before me. You had to hold them with both hands to get a good view of the page, and the layout of the panels defied the easier left-to-right reading of the books I kept busy with at my hometown library. They were my favorite things. During the schoolyear, my father sometimes traveled to India on his own, and Tintin was part of what made it so exciting and dramatic for me when he returned home -- he would open his big suitcase on the floor and make separate piles of the treats he'd brought back for each of us, and at some point there would be a bright new comic for me, buried beneath some shirts. For a while it seemed to me that there was no other way to access these stories than by flying across the world and exchanging currencies.

The cities in India all have new names now, and the lending library has since shut down or moved, and the whole Herge library can be purchased online and often locally. I still prefer Tintin comics to pretty much everything else, but I think I was very lucky to have been introduced to them in this particular way, with the dirt road and possible Coke bottles. They were books that required work both to get and to consume, which made the story of reading them important to the story within them, or maybe the other way around."


{Sumanth Prabhaker is the founding editor of Madras Press, a non-profit publisher of individually bound short stories and novella-length booklets that donates its proceeds to charitable organizations selected by the authors. His novella A Mere Pittance was among the inaugural titles to be released last winter, benefiting Helping Hands, a program that trains capuchin monkeys to become live-in helpers to people with disabilities. For more information, visit Madras Press here.}

David Barringer, On Reading

"A book is the delivery system for a hallucinogen you ingest through the eyes and digest in the mind. Reading allows one imagination to taste the inside of another."


{David Barringer is the author of There's Nothing Funny About Design, American Home Life, Johnny Red, and Emigre 68: American Mutt Barks in the Yard. Visit his website here for more information.}

Bhanu Kapil, On Reading

"I read in order to emigrate. To not be there anymore. To leave the life I am in, if that is not too boring and repetitive a way to say it. It is boring to emigrate. There are airports, for example, and then a weird stretch some way in when it is too late to go back. In such a stretch now, and with family responsibilities that I never quite imagined - - I find myself reading poetry, or trying to read poetry, that is more beautiful than my actual life. I read the poetry of Dolores Dorantes, in translation by Jen Hofer in 'the red book.' I read out of the sorrow that comes over immigrants, all immigrants perhaps. Economic sorrow? Social sorrow? Anxiety that does not have a commercial antidote? I don't know. Note to self: Find out what is in other people's hearts. Start with my own heart. To summarize: I read in order to be a writer in the time I am in, which is a closed time. I read to open myself to time, which is the time that opens in turn to writing. I read to flee taut death; to embrace wet or sinking deaths instead. This probably is not making an ounce of sense. I read because it is all I have. It is the only way I know back to writing, other than an obliterating love."


{Bhanu Kapil is the author of four prose/poetry books, most recently one that doesn't exist: Schizophrene, forthcoming from Nightboat Books in Spring 2011. She teaches at Naropa University and Goddard College. Visit her blog here.}

Dawn Raffel, On Reading

"I like reading aloud. It's how I write, and if I'm really enjoying a book, I'll read a few pages aloud so I can absorb its cadences. I loved reading aloud to my children. And I love re-reading. The best books do not begin to reveal their secrets to you until you have read them two or three times."


{Dawn Raffel is the author of three books, most recently Further Adventures in the Restless Universe (Dzanc). She has recently completed a memoir in vignettes. Visit her website here for more information.}

John Madera, On Reading

"The Whatness of Our Whoness: On Reading

In this land of bilk and money, where the snares of immediacy (of self-gratification, communication, data mining, matchmaking, etc.) may sometimes fool us into thinking that we’re getting closer, that we’re finally nesting within the intimacy we crave, that we matter, somehow, to someone; that it is, after all, a small world; where technological marvels with their ringing bells and screeching whistles have stunned us into a state of wow, causing us to say 'awesome' so frequently it’s lost all meaning; where apathy in its various forms is the new cool; in this land of I, me, mine, this land where time is money and money is the only thing that matters, the act of reading from a book might just be a singular waste of time, or it might be one of the most life-affirming acts, the continuum where we discover, as Joyce wrote in Ulysses, the 'whatness of our whoness'.

My reading habits have usually been disorderly, no, chaotic, difficult to pin down, never falling into any consistent approach, or system, or school of study; more improvisatory, a peculiar kind of going with the flow (a flow whose currents flow back to the past and forward to the future) with my, admittedly, sometimes fleeting interests, or in connection with some project I’m working on, e.g., research for a story I’m crafting, or reading works within a particular genre I’m also working within like, for instance, the year I read approximately seventy-five books of fantasy when I was working on one of my own; but on the whole my reading has been catholic and wanton, if I may be allowed to have those two words be kissing cousins. That said, my reading has, within the past few years, become more intentional, focused, and, I hope, purposeful. For instance, much of my reading last year consisted of reading and reviewing contemporary works of fiction, concentrating specifically on the literature published by independent presses, of which I felt produced, and I still feel produces, the fresher, more ambitious, more accomplished, and, at times, even revelatory work in literature today. However, whenever I encountered a contemporary work that was weak—and the lion’s share of that weakness was usually found in the occasional book I’d read from the major presses, or from the internet’s ever-proliferating, self-reflexive, self-congratulatory, sloppy, and solipsistic websites, and especially in the submissions pile I was reading from as a fiction editor—I would turn back, and some would say, turn back the clock, to earlier works, and find myself immersed in sentences that sung almost operatically and virtuosically, and bemoan the sad and sorry state of literature today. I’ve written about this before, but it’s important to once again note, that this notion, that is, that there was a golden age or ages of literature, is, of course, a fantasy, and a shortsighted one, in fact, since any kind of surface study of any era would reveal that it contained a similarly disproportionate level of mediocre work. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that there are so many contemporary writers who are producing work that is ambitious and challenging, that explores language with great creativity, adventure, rigor, and intelligence. So I seesaw, no, I thumb the scales sometimes to privilege past eras, but I also pendulate, going back and forth between the past and present. I feel, though, that I may be going back more than I will forth for the next long while. The more I read of the recognized literary masterworks, the more I see how contemporary literature is indebted to the works of the past, and, sadly, how often it falls short. It’s no grand revelation, but it does raise some questions, namely, how important is it for me to read a contemporary work of literature if I haven’t read the work from which it was most certainly derived, or would not have existed if said work was not produced. And as I realize this, I also recognize the vast gaps of my understandings of the interconnections, borrowings, ideas, within the history of literature, and this, in turn, adds to my ever-present anxiety about all I want to, need to, and should read.

Yes, I love to read and to share what I’ve read; and I also love to hear what others have read and are reading. Though aware of the many distractions competing for our attentions, diminishing our already tapped time to simply be, to enjoy the sound of the 'infinite great fall of rain' (as Joyce wrote in Ulysses) instead of tap-tap-tapping away at some keyboard, I’m always surprised to talk to someone who isn’t reading anything at the moment or hasn’t read anything in a while, or who, worst of all, isn’t worried about it. The surprise is even greater when that person happens to be a writer, and you’d be surprised by how many there are who aren’t reading, and if they are reading, they are usually reading their peers and contemporaries (a rather narrow menu for anyone with any kind of real appetite for invention, ambition, and creativity, for getting lost in a lacuna of language), and many of whom think that Hemingway is the only way, or that anorectic prose is somehow more evocative, relevant, insightful, or whatever. Though I certainly love cutting, bone white, crisp language, I also love luxuriant prose full of exposition, metaphor, lyricism, essayistic asides, etc., writing that utilizes the full resources of language. How rare it is to find it even in poetry.

Language, for me, comes from language, and ideas come from ideas, so I can’t imagine not reading books, for me the best source of language and ideas; they are a kind of food, an energy source, and, yes, one means of discovering, questioning, fracturing, critiquing the what of who I am and the who of what I am, of what and who I was and may become."


{John Madera's work is forthcoming in Conjunctions, The Believer, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Corduroy Mountain. His fiction has appeared in Opium Magazine, Featherproof Press, elimae, Everyday Genius, ArtVoice, Underground Voices, and Little White Poetry Journal #7. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, his reviews have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Bookslut, The Collagist, DIAGRAM, Fiction Writers Review, Flatmancrooked, The Millions, The Prairie Journal: A Magazine of Canadian Literature, The Quarterly Conversation, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, New Pages, Open Letters Monthly, The Rumpus, Tarpaulin Sky, Word Riot, and in 3:AM Magazine. He is editing a collection of essays on the craft of writing (Publishing Genius Press). He edits the forum Big Other and journal The Chapbook Review. Former fiction editor at Identity Theory, he is senior flash fiction editor at jmww. His monthly column, “A Reader’s Log(orrhea),” may be found at The Nervous Breakdown.}

Christopher Kennedy, On Reading

"When I was ten, the northeastern United States experienced 'the great blackout.' It was the peak of the Cold War. Everyone’s thoughts ran toward the notion of an attack by the Soviet Union. My mother got me out of bed. She said we were going to her friend’s house, a woman she worked with whose home, though modest, had a fireplace. I remember walking into the house, past a small table, toward the flames that illuminated the living room and gave off a comforting heat. On the table was a book. A paperback. Books were scarce in my home, and no book I’d ever seen had a cover image like this one: a man with a shield in one hand, a woman’s head in the other. He held the head by the hair. But this wasn’t a normal head of hair. It was made of snakes. I stopped and stared at the image of Perseus holding Medusa’s decapitated head, transfixed. My mother’s friend broke the spell by asking me if I’d like to look at the book. I said yes, picked it up, walked into the living room, and lay down in front of the fireplace.

I forgot about the possibility that the world was coming to an end. I was too busy discovering a different world. There was Zeus and Hera. There was Achilles and Hector. There was Jason and the Argonauts. I was so absorbed in this world that I had what I would now call a transcendent experience. At the time, I just knew that I wasn’t afraid any more.

When the blackout was over, we said our good-byes and prepared to go home. My mother’s friend asked me if I wanted to take the book with me. It was her daughter’s, but she knew she would want me to have it. I was ecstatic and slightly guilty. How could anyone part with this? I took it. For the next few weeks I did nothing else in my spare time but read the book. There was Odysseus and Oedipus. There was Paris and Helen.

That book, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, changed me in some elemental way. It gave me hope. For all I know it saved my life. My father had died a few years before. My mother was incapable of raising me on her own. I was on the cusp of turning from good student to juvenile delinquent. I did go down a path toward self-destruction, but I had something to take with me, and I have no doubt that book and the ones that followed, kept me from self-obliteration.

A few years after that night, I found out from my mother that her friend’s daughter had killed herself. I thought of the book. I knew it was ridiculous, but I thought maybe she’d done it because she gave it up. I thought she had sacrificed herself to save me. That’s how much I believe in the power of books."


{Christopher Kennedy is the author of three books, Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA Editions, Ltd.), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award in 2007, Trouble with the Machine (Low Fidelity Press), and Nietzsche's Horse (Mitki/Mitki Press). A fourth book, a collection of prose poems, Ennui Prophet, is due from BOA in 2011. His work has appeared in numerous print and on-line journals and magazines, including Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Slope, Mississippi Review, and New York Tyrant. One of the founding editors of the literary journal, 3rd Bed, he is an associate professor of English at Syracuse University where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.}

Gina Frangello, On Reading

"I am among the contingent to whom reading was like a road map to other possibilities, other futures. Like most people in the world, I come from an insular place--in my case among the urban poor, in a homogeneous Italian neighborhood of Chicago circa the 70s and 80s--where there seemed to be one way of doing things, one future offered, especially to girls. Reading was the secret fire that promised this was not so: that there were as many ways, as many potential adventures and choices as there were books on the shelves of a library. I read for all the usual reasons: I was an only child and often alone, longing for entertainment and company; I wanted to escape my environment; I wanted to feel the sort of profound emotional and psychological understanding that so often eludes children in real life, yet can be found on the pages of a novel. Yet while it sounds strange, although I have also written fiction for as long as I could read, I never read 'because I wanted to be a writer.' I tell my students constantly that in order to write, you must read passionately. But in truth, there are so many other reasons to read that this should be a redundant thing to tell any writer. Reading is an eternal dialogue with the rest of humanity; we read because it enriches us as human beings on every possible level. The fact that it also benefits our own writing is profoundly true, yet seems to me quite secondary as a motive."


{Gina Frangello is the author of the short story collection Slut Lullabies (Emergency Press 2010) and the novel My Sister's Continent (Chiasmus 2006), as well as the Executive Editor of the independent press Other Voices Books and fiction editor of the popular online literary collective The Nervous Breakdown. She has contributed nonfiction, book reviews and journalism to such publications as the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post and the Chicago Reader. Her novel, London Calling, will be released next year, and she can be found online here.}

Anthony Doerr, On Reading

"When you’re falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a two-way, extra-dimensional tunnel between a reader’s heart and a writer’s, a passageway that transcends the barriers of continents, generations, and often even death. When you’re engrossed in a book, you can shed the material complications of your body in a sentence and become the opposite sex; you can be six years old or seventy-six; you can be a Japanese sailor or an Indian surgeon or a Martian explorer; you can be Ishmael, or an oversized, perplexed cockroach.

You read for a half hour, an hour, an airplane flight. Then you look up. Your hand is cramped; your leg is asleep; time has mysteriously compressed. And here's the miracle: you’re different. You’ve changed. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book."


{Anthony Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho. He’s the author of three books: The Shell Collector, About Grace, and Four Seasons in Rome. Doerr’s fiction has won three O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. His work has been translated into eleven languages and has won awards including the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Ohioana Book Award twice. His fourth book, a collection of six long stories titled Memory Wall, was published by Scribner in July 0f 2010. Visit his website here or follow him on Facebook here.}

Matthew Simmons, On Reading

"For the last few months, I've noticed that I've been unable to finish books. Unable to focus on reading. I can spend a little time reading poetry here and there, but reading myself to sleep, and reading on lunch breaks, and reading on buses, and reading away my Saturday afternoons? Not happening. Not concentrating. Not retaining. A short story here and there. No novels beyond the first twenty pages—even when I am, for the most part, enjoying them. And because I'm not reading much, I'm not writing much. And because I'm not reading much, I feel really out of sorts. Disconnected.

I know this won't last forever, and that soon I'll go on a reading tear. I'm not sure what will trigger it. I wish I did.

Because not being able to read sucks. That's what I have to say about reading. Not being able to read sucks."


{Matthew Simmons lives in Seattle with his cat, Emmett. He is the author, most recently, of the novella A Jello Horse (Publishing Genius Press, 2009). He will publish a chapbook (The Moon Tonight Feels My Revenge) in 2010 and a collection of short stories in 2011 (Happy Rock), both from Keyhole Press. He is a regular contributor to HTML Giant and the interviews editor for Hobart. More information can be found here.}

Heather Hartley, On Reading

"At university, any way to make money seemed like a good way—at least for a couple of hours. From fish market monger to cork sandal seller to grammar tutor, it was all about pocketing cash for rent and summer trips and lipsticks. Reading was not first on my list in those days.

Then I was hired by the rare books library and it was there that divinity appeared to me, in my own hands, in the form of leather-bound, gilt-stamped volumes of Mark Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It. Even the scent of work was divine. And suddenly, those satiny glints of Daring Rose, Lilac Sky and Wicked Brown didn’t seem quite as crucial.

I would sneak in a chapter of Huck and his adventures amidst the shelving. Paragraphs were slipped in while cataloguing. I could not stop reading. I bought paperback copies to mark up at home. As any good university student, I stayed up late at night—but now it was to read. And books—those amazing blocks of godliness—took precedence in my co-ed life and on my shelves. Move over, Kicky Carmine Sunset, make way for words."


{Heather Hartley is the author of Knock Knock and is Paris Editor for Tin House magazine. She curates Shakespeare & Company Bookshop’s weekly reading series. Visit her website here for more information.}

Kate Bernheimer, On Reading

"It is a cliché but reading has always provided me with the greatest escape from the scary container of my own life and other people’s fearsome behavior. In reading I find rare consolation. I learned early on I could create the sensation of safety and solitude by entering nearly any book’s pages—as a kid this was often a comic book or magical novel, but I’ve always been omnivorous in my literary taste. The book is the thing. In desperation I can find consolation in other printed matter—one particular manual for an 8-track player at a mean friend’s sleepover party comes quickly to mind. But immersing myself in a book is sublime.

I read recently somewhere that scientists have confirmed something we bookworms always have known: that the scent of books , especially library books and old books, can release happy feelings, also known as endorphins. Some perfumeries are apparently trying to reproduce 'old book smell' and put it into their little bottles! Why don’t doctors prescribe constitutionals to the public library, I wonder?

One of my earliest memories of experiencing the reading sublime involves my first memorization of a poem. I remember discovering the poem in the library of my grade school. It was around fifth grade, and I had begun to be bullied around the same time.

Its first three and a half lines immediately etched themselves into my memory. These lines used to constantly pop into my head as I sat alone at recess, often under a giant tire in the playground where also were many spiders and worms. Though this is, in retrospect, an eerie poem, in childhood the poem did not trouble me—no, quite the contrary. The lines kept me great company for many years, made me feel safe and blissful in my quest for anonymity among other kids.

'I'm Nobody! Who are you? / Are you – Nobody – too? / Then there's a pair of us? / Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know! / How dreary – to be – Somebody! / How public – like a Frog – / To tell one's name – the livelong June – / To an admiring Bog!'

Sheer bliss, that poem. I think when I first found it, it was as the epigraph to a middle reader novel—with a supernatural plot. Though I never have confirmed this. Of course now I know it’s by one of my favorite writers of all time, Emily Dickinson, whose poems I read daily."


{Kate Bernheimer's first story collection, Horse, Flower, Bird, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press and is illustrated by Rikki Ducornet. Her third anthology, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales, is forthcoming from Penguin Books. She is the author of the novels The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold and The Complete Tales of Merry Gold and a children's book, and founder and editor of the literary journal Fairy Tale Review. Associate Professor and Writer in Residence at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, she is married to the poet Brent Hendricks.}

Cooper Renner, On Reading

"I used to be a public school librarian. Sometimes I would ask the students, 'Where is yesterday? Where is your own past?' And they would realize that it's only inside their heads. 'So are the books you read.' Reading is a way to take this one life--the only one you know for sure you have--and make it into hundreds or thousands of lives."


{Cooper Renner's chapbook, Dr. Polidori's Sketchbook, appeared earlier this year from Mud Luscious Press. Other fictions are current or upcoming with New York Tyrant and The Anemone Sidecar. Visit his website here for more information.}

Prathna Lor, On Reading

"When I am upon my books, it is not because reality has failed me, rather, I seek novel ways to engage it."


{Prathna Lor (b. 1989) is the author of Ventriloquism, forthcoming from Future Tense Books. He lives in Canada. Visit his website here for more information.}

Kendra Grant Malone, On Reading

"I have dyslexia, so reading has always been very difficult for me. This has greatly influenced what kind of things I like to read. I favor poetry, because it is broken up and swift. I also favor writers that use simple language and small words to convey ideas. I don't like to tell people I'm dyslexic unless I have to because often people respond with pity or a lot of questions. How could a writer be dyslexic?! When people hear about disabilities of any kind all they see is a world of limits and they feel sad for you, like you are an incomplete version of themselves. I feel sorry for people who aren't dyslexic. They will never be moved they way I am moved by simplicity.

Often I hear people say things like 'If you want to be a good writer, read more.' Reading has become a tool for many writers to be better at writing, more informed, more skilled, or to help them out of a block. For me, writing has taught me to read."


{Kendra Grant Malone lives in Brooklyn with her cat Delores Grant Malone. Her first book of poetry will be available from Scrambler Books in September of 2010. You can read more of her work here.}

Zoë Jenny, On Reading

"As a child I was fascinated by books and their ability to take you on a journey. It never ceases to amaze me how one can travel the world and live through the experiences of others while all the while sitting in a room with nothing but a book in one's hand."


{Zoë Jenny is the author of Der Ruf des Muschelhorns (2000), Ein schnelles Leben (2002), Das Portrait (2007), The Pollen Room (1997), and her latest novel is The Sky Is Changing (2010). Visit her website here for more information.}

Lydia Millet, On Reading

"There's a chemistry that occurs between the human brain and the written word and the white spaces on the page — a chemistry quite unlike any other. Of course, chemistry is a metaphor in the terms of science, but there are other metaphors that work as well; reading is also an act of magic or mysticism, even an act of strange religion. The sublime manifests itself in words, the unspeakable comes out of words and goes beyond them.

We can’t separate our thinking from words, as we can separate it from so many other human productions. Words seem to exist in us both before and after thought, as well as during thought and being thought. They're both eternally outside our control and actively, if elusively, within it.

Because of the power that words have in our minds, the words of others — and especially the passionate and individual, idiosyncratic compendia of words that form themselves into books — are a kind of communion between minds, a communion that can't be reached in other ways. In books we have something unique. As long as we put ourselves into books, our passion and our intelligence and the parts of us that can’t be seen anywhere else at all, we have nothing to fear.

As long as we read, and read well, we need not fear obsolescence, we need not fear even death. Great books speak beyond death. They are the death-defiers. Books are the vessels that exist both inside and outside time."


{Lydia Millet's collection of short stories, Love In Infant Monkeys, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She is the author of several novels, including Everyone's Pretty, How The Dead Dream, and My Happy Life, which won the PEN-USA Award for Fiction. Visit her website here for more information.}

Blake Butler, On Reading

"Reading is eating. There are corndogs and there is cereal and there is lettuce. It's fun to get a lot of weird shit up in your waddle. You get really hungry sometimes, and other times you want to go for a good big walk. I like exercising on a stationary bike or running on a treadmill while I read because it's like becoming and unbecoming the fat boy at once, which pushes out inside doubly. Sometimes I drive my car and read. I drive better because of it. I want everything inside me. I want to see a dog squatting over America. Books have butts. They have legs and arms and money. Some will help you to the bed. Guns are in books sometimes and sometimes, less often, Hostess products appear. My mom taught me to want to read by showing me a big bag I was not allowed to look in. I took one book out at a time. I am a pig child and so I ate it and I ate the words and I got XL. I had to wear the shirts that looked like teepees. Thanks, books."


{Blake Butler edits HTML Giant and will release his third book, There Is No Year, from Harper Perennial in 2011. Visit his website here for more information.}

Lily Hoang, On Reading

"Books are my graying hairs: there is only one until one is five and five is a million and on and on. I can pluck my hair more quickly than I can read a book though.

I don’t pull out my gray hairs."


{Lily Hoang is the author of The Evolutionary Revolution, Changing (recipient of a 2009 PEN/Beyond Margins Award), and Parabola (winner of the 2006 Chiasmus Press Un-Doing the Novel Contest). She serves as an Associate Editor at Starcherone Books and Editor at Tarpaulin Sky. Visit her website here for more information.}

Amy King, On Reading

"Start A Revolution: Read This Book

Reading appears passive because it takes place in a chair, on a bed, at the beach, in the tub, etc. Reading is action, exercise demanding strength of mind. Therein lies the resistance ('so boring!') of folks spoon-fed DVDs and television growing up (John Berryman replies, 'Ever to confess you're bored / means you have no /Inner Resources.'). Reading these words requires mind muscle that the average episode of Law and Order does not (exemption: visual arts can render complex readings). Watching takes less effort, but using your cabeza to think-into-being concepts, characters, and ideas lying dormant in a book, well, this means working the imagination into a sweat and, by default, developing other difficult-to-discuss human attributes like empathy and conscience. We stretch and test and grow those head-muscles through debate, analysis, and reading. When we neglect such exercises, when we simply let worldly representations enter our heads unquestioned, those muscles atrophy. We go numb, passive and blanketly accept most anything, eventually. Sense of self fades, as does ability to discriminate harmful practices and ideas from better ones. We turn sheep and look to the flock for answers. Nietzsche weeps. We can’t imagine walking in another’s shoes; the stuff that makes us human eludes. Pull the blanket tighter around our favorite default setting (‘me, me, me’) instead of becoming a little less selfish. Reading enables identification with the other (O romantic notion) and to think beyond and, conversely, add to our knowledge-base. Apropos, David Foster Wallace quoted Don DeLillo, '…if serious reading disappears in this country, it will mean that whatever--it will mean that whatever we mean by the term identity has ceased to exist.' Why schedule work-outs for the body, but neglect everything above the neck? Start a revolution, 'Kill your television' and 'Steal this book.'"


{Amy King's most recent book is Slaves to Do These Things (Blazevox), and forthcoming, I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press). She is currently preparing a book of interviews with the poet Ron Padgett. She also teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. With Ana Božičević, King co-curates the Brooklyn-based reading series, The Stain of Poetry. For more information, please visit her website here.}

John Domini, On Reading

"Reading happily, engaging both the spine and the boneless complexity at its top, takes me down through the layers of an old city dig, so that under one plaster surface I’ll discover the European stateliness of Beckett or Conrad, then under another the American restlessness of Cather or Hawkes, and then deeper still the sketchy figures of Christ or Achilles or Enkidu; and while these discoveries feel genuine and worth pointing out, and while in essays and reviews I’ve pointed them out, the eternal shapes in the textures of narrative, at the same time those figures also seem personal, I mean the archeology also reveals the clear traces of my own rise and fall (and fall, and fall), so that if I’m thinking of Achilles I’m also thinking of some Stories of Greek Heroes compiled by some anthologist I couldn’t possibly remember now, or if I’m thinking of Conrad I’m also thinking of how I tried to share my enthusiasm for Nostromo with a girl from the next borough, a lover more or less; and so reading now also stirs me like a long marriage, in which the whisper of a well-made sentence can reanimate hurts or pleasures I’d have believed were fossilized themselves, but in fact nothing’s ever finally a fossil, it’s all telling stories, and around me they rise again, clamoring, numberless, invisible cities."


{John Domini has won awards in all genres, publishing fiction in Paris Review, Ploughshares, and anthologies, non-fiction in GQ, The New York Times, and other journals, and poetry in Zone 3, Meridian (Editors’ Prize, 2006), and elsewhere. Grants have included fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram-Merrill Foundation. The Emerging Writers Network, in a four-and-a-half-star review, called his novels from '07 and '08, Earthquake I.D. and A Tomb on the Periphery, "back-to-back stunners." Tomb on the Periphery also made the '09 short list at the London Book Festival for "the best of international publishing," and Earthquake I.D., in Italian translation, was runner-up for the Domenico Rea prize. Please visit his website here for more information.}

Eric Beeny, On Reading

"Reading is a much more effective way of critically engaging and contributing to the literary culture than writing. Producing literature in any form is certainly an effort to enrich that culture, and to see oneself temporarily immortalized by one's peers and, hopefully, by an audience. That appears to be the desired result. But without reading works written prior to one's emergence into the culture, there exists no dialogue between writers and their writings. All art is dialectical and therefore every piece is a response or proposition, if not to a particular artist then to a particular work of art—or, in literature, to the canon as a whole. That dialectic, that conversation over time, designs a kind of blueprint, a map of where literature and art have come from, why they've adopted their current incarnations. Without that blueprint to inform the cultural architecture one hopes to construct in the future, collapse won’t be the earthquake's fault...."


{Eric Beeny is the author of The Dying Bloom (Pangur Ban Party, 2009), Snowing Fireflies (Folded Word Press, 2010) and Of Creatures (Gold Wake Press, 2011). His blog can be found at Dead End on Progressive Ave.}

Matthew Savoca, On Reading

"When I was twelve or so, I read White Fang, Call of the Wild, and this other book that I have never since been able to find the title of. It was called Flight of something or Plight of something. It involved a wolf again. It was about a wolf named Gray who killed some other dog or something and then a farmer was trying to kill him, but the young boy loved the wolf so he ran away with him to save him. They lived in the woods on the run. After those books about boys and wolves, I think I read Congo and then Sphere by Michael Crichton. After that, I didn't read anything for a really long time. Then when I was twenty or so, I started reading again since I didn't own any 'going out' clothes. I read lots of classics that I hadn't been reading and then I read almost everything by Hemingway and then basically everything by any Russian writer. Eventually I started reading much more contemporary writing which I sort of felt pretty unexcited about until I ended up finding writers like Frederick Barthelme, Ann Beattie, Jean Rhys, Richard Yates, etc. and occasionally a really good older book like I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal. But I don't really read so much anymore. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I'm past the age of 27 which I think is when certain people lose interest in stuff for a period of anywhere between 3 months and 11 years, at the end of which they begin to get interested in things again, maybe."


{Matthew Savoca (born USA 1982) is the author of long love poem with descriptive title, a poetry book to be published in September 2010 by Scrambler Books. Visit his website here for more information.}

Michael Meyerhofer, On Reading

"Like a lot of writers, I read both for entertainment and inspiration. While I primarily draw from daily life, there's nothing like a great line or a solid image from another writer to kick-start the creative process, even inspire a little healthy competition ('Hey, I wonder if I can write a better poem/story than what I just read!'). I'm primarily drawn to writers who blend accessible narrative and what feels like sincere, resonating emotion with a little humor and/or a feeling of emotional objectivity or a hint of (dare I say it?) wisdom. Some examples: Stephen Dobyns, Dorianne Laux, George Bilgere, Tony Hoagland, Djelloul Marbrook, Sharon Olds, Beth Ann Fennelly, Mary Biddinger, and Jeannine Hall Gailey. I also like to dip my heels in prose from time to time with the likes of J.D. Salinger, Ernest Hemingway, Tobias Wolff, Stephen King, George R. R. Martin, George Orwell, and Kurt Vonnegut. I spend a lot of time reading lit journals--not just to get a good mix of contemporary poetry and prose, but to look for trends and aesthetics on behalf of editors today. Otherwise, I'm a total dork and spend untold hours on Wikipedia and various science websites or listening to Alan Watts lectures."


{Michael Meyerhofer’s second book, Blue Collar Eulogies, was published by Steel Toe Books. His first, Leaving Iowa, won the Liam Rector First Book Award. He has also won the Marjorie J. Wilson Best Poem Contest, the James Wright Poetry Award, the Laureate Prize, the Annie Finch Prize for Poetry, and four chapbook prizes. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals, and can be read online at his website here and at his blog here.}

Sasha Fletcher, On Reading

"I. I think it is as important to not like a book as it is to like a book, and I think it's even more important to try to figure out why we feel what we feel towards what we read.

II. And anyway I read a lot when I am stuck so that I can find something really good to borrow or steal or anything at all to get me to line my words up in a better formation.

III. But I read mostly because I like to. Because I want to feel something. To get excited. To be moved. To fall to my knees and fucking weep.

IV. Another way to put it is that when I was in the third grade I broke my right wrist and so instead of learning cursive I had to write book reports and at some point it became more interesting to me to make up the stories I had read than to write about something someone else wrote about and this is the point probably where things started to happen but I never would have done that if it wasn't for all those goddam book reports each and every week."


{Sasha Fletcher's novella When All Our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill The Streets And We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs In The Clouds is out now from Mud Luscious Press. He is an MFA candidate in Poetry at Columbia University in the city of New York. Visit his website here for more information.}

Kevin Sampsell, On Reading

"The other day, right before my weekend began, I starting thinking about what I wanted to do with my days off. My social calendar was free--no parties or readings to go to--and no assignments to finish. I could start on my next big writing project, a novel I keep procrastinating on, but something else tugged on my heart stronger. Chopping away at the big forest of books that I have scattered around the home. That's right--I like reading more than I like writing.

I thought about it and confronted myself with a question: If I could do anything with my time--if I was the LAST PERSON ALIVE ON EARTH!--what would I do? The answer, perhaps boring and predictable: I'd want to read. Buildings could be crumbling around me and fires engulfing clothing stores and I'd probably just be looking for a comfortable couch to lay on with some Nabakov (who I still have not read yet!) or some Daniel Clowes comics. Sure, I'd go to the neighborhood DVD rental place and scavenge through the wreckage for good movies each day too--but even with movies, my main focus and source of enjoyment comes from how the writer, director, and actors tell a story. I watch movies to see how visual stories are built.

But most of the time would be spent reading. I'd even walk around neighborhoods and towns (like the man and boy in Cormac McCarthy's The Road) and break into people's houses just to see their books. Maybe I'd lounge on their sofa or rock in their rocking chair and read things that I never thought I'd read--Louis L'Amour or Stephanie Meyer--while I ate whatever non-perishable food they had. Maybe I'd discover something new and alive and beautiful. I would laugh and cry. I would read the best lines out loud, just to startle the silence. Makes Doomsday sound kind of okay."


{Kevin Sampsell is the editor of the anthology Portland Noir, the publisher of Future Tense Books, and the author of Creamy Bullets and A Common Pornography. Please visit his website here for more information.}

Marta Acosta, On Reading

"On the day I learned to read, I couldn’t wait to get inside the house to show my mother. We sat down on the front steps of our Berkeley home and I read my children’s book to her. Reading was magical and I was amazed that these ink marks on paper could tell a story.

I fell in love with reading that day and I am still in love with it.

There is a joke: What is the difference between a spouse and a dog? After a year, the dog is still happy to see you come home. A book always welcomes you, too."


{Marta Acosta is the author of the award-winning Casa Dracula series, including the upcoming Haunted Honeymoon (Simon & Schuster/Gallery, October 2010). Her most recent novel is Nancy's Theory of Style, which was released in May under her pen name Grace Coopersmith. Her websites can be found here and here, and she blogs here.}

Kyle Minor, On Reading

"Reading is my primary pleasure. Here is a list of books stacked on my desk this morning:

Elegy for the Southern Drawl, Rodney Jones
The Colony, Jillian Weise
The Shining, Stephen King
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Nathan Englander
American Salvage, Bonnie Jo Campbell
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera
Collected Novellas, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
All Aunt Hagar's Children, Edward P. Jones
The Rector of Justin, Louis Auchincloss
Miracle Boy and Other Stories, Pinckney Benedict
The Stories of John Cheever
Jesus' Son, Denis Johnson
Witz, Joshua Cohen
Correction, Thomas Bernhard
American Rendering, Andrew Hudgins
Sabbath's Theater, Philip Roth
Quotidiana, Patrick Madden
Stoner, John Williams
Extra Lives, Tom Bissell
The Oxford Book of Letters, ed. Frank Kermode
The Pugilist at Rest, Thom Jones
Blow-Up and Other Stories, Julio Cortazar
The Union Jack, Imre Kertesz
Hue and Cry, James Alan McPherson
The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
Wet Places at Noon, Lee K. Abbott
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace
India after Gandhi, R. Guha
Hard Times, Studs Terkel
In the Gloaming, Alice Elliott Dark
Open Secrets, Alice Munro
The Departure Lounge, Paul Eggers
With the Beatles, Lewis Lapham
The Best European Fiction 2010 (Dalkey)
A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze/Guattari
Pank No. 4

My desk is badly in need of straightening-up."


{Kyle Minor is the author of In the Devil's Territory, a collection of stories and novellas. Recent work appears in Best American Mystery Stories, The Southern Review, and Fiftytwostories.com. He lives in Ohio. Visit his website here for more information.}

Antonia Crane, On Reading

"I’m promiscuous with books. When I pick up a book, I’m attracted to the title and compelled by the opening sentence. Within the first fifty pages, I’m after a thrill. If it doesn’t happen fast enough, I tell it to get the fuck out of my house. Then I pick up another book and dig for the juice to get me writing. I cruise for sentences that make me gasp; characters that I want to kill or kiss; endings that leave me wanting more. This goes on for weeks, until I have four or five books going at once, until one of them makes me ache, scream or laugh out loud and that’s the one I finish because I used it as a springboard to dunk me into my own work until it’s time to find another."


{Antonia Crane has an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. Her memoir is titled Stripped: Tales of a Sexual Outlaw. Excerpts have been published in The Coachella Review and Black Clock Press. She has received scholarships from College of the Redwoods, Mills College, Antioch University and The Squaw Valley Community of Writers. She’s a sex worker and free-lance journalist who lives in Los Angeles. She's a featured columnist for The Rumpus and is an editor at The Citron Review. You can check out her blog here.}

Jason Jordan, On Reading

"I've adopted the 'finish what you start' adage when it comes to reading. That is, I finish a book even if I hate it. I do this because I've found that when I finish a book I don't like, I'm more able to shape and express my opinions than when I put it down at the first taste of disinterest/dislike. This practice informs my writing, because it helps me know what I like, what I don't like, and why, and what I believe I should or shouldn't do in my own writing. It's great to read a book you love, but I think it's equally important to be familiar with those you don't."


{Jason Jordan holds an MFA from Chatham University. His forthcoming books are Cloud and Other Stories and Powering the Devil's Circus: Redux--both from Six Gallery Press, 2010. His work has appeared in over forty literary magazines. Additionally, he edits decomP, accessible here, and his blog can be found here.}

Brandi Wells, On Reading

"Reading, like drinking a glass of milk or walking the dog or masturbating, is one of those things I have to do before I can sleep. Otherwise I toss and turn and think about Big Macs and German chocolate ice cream."


{Brandi Wells has a chapbook forthcoming in the chapbook collective, Fox Force 5 (Paper Hero Press). Visit her website here for more information.}

CL Bledsoe, On Reading

"I’m a reader from a family of readers. I’m not a snob when it comes to books, because I realized long ago that critics have agendas, though I don’t really enjoy simplistic books. Right now, I’m reading The Anthologist by NicholsonBaker and Lamb by Christopher Moore. Now that it’s summer, I’m looking forward to reading Enduring, Donald Harington’s last novel, and Tom Jones. If one wants to be a writer, one has to read. If one wants to understand the world, one has to read. Luckily, reading is one of the most fun things a person can do alone."


{CL Bledsoe is the author of two poetry collections, _____(Want/Need) and Anthem. A short story collection, Naming the Animals, is forthcoming this summer. He regularly reviews for a number of journals. Visit his blog here for more information.}

Ravi Mangla, On Reading

"The ability and desire to create art is a defining characteristic of the human species, yet another quality that separates us from our animal relatives. Which is to say, after finishing a good short story or poem I have this powerful urge to go outside and taunt the neighbor’s cat, flap a book cover in front of a terrified squirrel, but with considerable difficulty I resist. Why? Because reading teaches empathy. And empathy is pretty damn important. Books continue to further my evolution as a writer and as a human being."


{Ravi Mangla's short fiction has appeared or will appear soon in Mid-American Review, Gargoyle, Annalemma, Sleepingfish, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. He is the Associate Series Editor for the annual Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions. Visit his website here and his collection of reading lists here.}

Ben Greenman, On Reading

"I can't quite survive without writing, and reading is, to me, part of writing. They are two ends of the same process, as intertwined as eating and shi...well, there you go -- thirty words in and I've already run up against a vulgarity. Let's change that and say that reading is the inbreath and writing is the outbreath. I have gone moderate stretches without reading, mostly because I was younger, and, being younger, believed a professor who told me, quite authoritatively, that a real writer did not read other people's books while he was working on his own. That guy was wrong. I depend upon reading as I depend upon music, or conversation, or looking at the world: it provides me with ideas, perspectives, company, competition, light, loss, and love. It provides everything. Books are magical things, entire worlds contained in objects the size of a dinner plate."


{Ben Greenman is an editor at the New Yorker and the author of several acclaimed books of fiction, including Superbad, Please Step Back, and the forthcoming What He's Poised To Do. He lives in Brooklyn and maintains a website here.}

Martin Page, On Reading

"La plupart des choses que je lis ne sont pas des livres.

Tout à commencé par des romans c’est vrai, ils m’ont formé, ils m’ont appris à poser un regard passionné et scrutateur sur les choses, à transformer des mots en images et en sensations ; mais peu à peu la lecture est devenue une faculté propre, un don qui s’appliquait à tous les objets.

Les livres nous enseignent ceci : le monde entier se lit. Il n’y a pas d’évidence. Voir, entendre, goûter, ce n’est rien. Ce que nous voyons il faut le lire, ce que nous mangeons il faut le lire. Les choses ne sont pas données. Nous les prenons. Nous les captivons et les décodons.

La lecture est une expérience générale et permanente. Il n’y a pas de différence entre nos yeux qui suivent une ligne de texte et ces mêmes yeux qui regardent la personne qui se trouve en face de nous.

Bien sûr on peut ne pas avoir conscience de cette lecture, on peut la refuser ; on peut décider de la réserver aux livres. On peut faire comme s’il suffisait de voir, d’entendre, de recevoir le monde sur notre rétine. Mais cela signifie devenir un simple support où s’impriment les caractères du monde. Nous sommes lus, c’est pourquoi il nous faut lire."


{Martin Page's novel, How I Became Stupid (Penguin), has been translated into twenty-four languages and was awarded the Euregio-Schüler-Literaturpreis. His most recent novel, The Discreet Pleasures Of Rejection (Penguin), was published in January of 2010. Visit his website here for more information.}

Deborah Poe, On Reading

"Not long ago, I dreamt I was looking at a highly intricate book that writer Selah Saterstrom had made. But every page was more like a drawer, a compartment or a box. I considered how long she must have saved all the objects that were within every 'page.' In every 'page' were at least 20 objects—colorful fish beads, miniature tarot or decorated cards, stones. Every 'page,' with all enclosed objects, contributed to a story. I mean the objects were acting as 'text(s),' and those texts were a means of storytelling. It probably goes without saying after relaying this dream, but I think reading is a magical thing. I often read a book, either conceptually or formally, tied to what I will write the following day and let it seep into the twilight hours of writing when I wake up. I believe reading what you love comes to inhabit the pieces you write in mysterious and beautiful ways. As a teacher, I believe that a student who devours books is more likely to enlarge his or her range of influence in the world. A student with an understanding of prose and poetry can read the world in terms of metaphor, point of view, and association, expanding and deepening his or her perceptions—of self and other. Reading helps us negotiate human experience which can be terrible, overwhelming, confusing, lonely. A recent British study indicated women in impoverished areas around the world were less depressed than those who were disconnected from the Internet. Reading helps us connect with human beings. Reading allows us to see, and to be seen, within a larger framework of complexities. This framework is necessary for 'grasping' a richer understanding of social, political and cultural questions—questions dominant narratives don’t necessarily ask or answer. I believe reading and language are the connective tissue that allow us to resist barriers of thought and experience. Rikki Ducornet, in her essay The Deep Zoo, writes: 'In the tradition of Islam, the first word that was revealed to Mohammed was Igrá (Read!) The world is a translation of the divine, and its manifestation. To write a text is to propose a reading of the world and to reveal its potencies. Writing is reading and reading a way back to the initial impulse. Both are acts of revelation (para.1) .'"

{Deborah Marie Poe is fiction editor of Drunken Boat, guest curator/editor for Trickhouse in 2010/2011 and assistant professor of English at Pace University, Westchester. Deborah is the author of the poetry collections Elements (Stockport Flats Press 2010) and Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords 2008). Her prose and poetry have recently appeared in Give a Fig (Les Figues Press’ blog), Colorado Review, Sidebrow and Denver Quarterly. For more information, please visit her website here.}

Patrick O'Neil, On Reading

"I write like a speedfreak. I just keep going until my fingers bleed. Then I crash out and sleep for three days straight. I read like a junkie. I get a book. I get all calm, thinking I'm good for a while. Then I read it straight through until there's no more. Two hours later I'm Jonesing again for another. I gotta have more books. I mean really, I don't think you understand. I need to read or I don't write. I always plan on stashing a book, but it never works out. Then I'm scamming 'em from friends and hustling my local used bookstore. Come on man, I'll pay ya the twenty I owe you next week. Just give me the damn thing now!"

{Patrick O'Neil writes nonfiction most editors don't want. He has been known for intimidating literary journals and a few have fallen for it and printed his work. His junkie memoir, Opacity has yet to find a home. He teaches English comp to students whose idea of literature is a text message. Visit his blog: Full Blue Moon Dementia.}

Davy Rothbart, On Reading

"21 Of My Favorite Books!

The 21 Balloons by William Peñe Dubois
Into the Dream by William Sleator
No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July
Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap
Clumsy by Jeffrey Brown
The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll
The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliot
The Combination by Ashley Nelson
This Is Our War edited by Devin Friedman
The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis
Stealing Buddha’s Dinner by Bich Nguyen
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
Methland by Nick Reding
The Last Shot by Darcy Frey
How to Rent A Negro by Damali Ayo
A Common Pornography by Kevin Sampsell
Burn Collector by Al Burian
Clock Without A Face by Eli Horowitz and Mac Barnett
Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon by Dean Bakopoulos
The Skeptical Juror and the Trial of Byron Case by John Allen
Saguaro by Carson Mell"

{Davy Rothbart is the author of The Lone Surfer Of Montana, Kansas and the creator and editor of Found Magazine, and he contributes regularly to This American Life. Visit his website here for more information.}

Brian Evenson, On Reading

"When I was just a kid I remember my mother lying on the couch reading Agatha Christie novels. Often she'd fall so deeply into her book that she wouldn't respond when I spoke to her, wasn't even quite aware that I was there. Seeing that made me think of books as something with a hypnotic, almost mystical power.

A good, well-written book, whatever its genre, is capable of erasing the world, and of making the world feel as if it's been changed by the time you return to it. In my process of reading (and of writing) that act of effacing or erasing or blotting out the world is always present, as is the sense of estranged return. I'm not sure how I can simultaneously fall into a book and still admire and enjoy what it's doing with syntax and language, but somehow it happens. And it happens more completely for me with books than with any other activity."

{Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction, most recently the limited edition novella Baby Leg, published by New York Tyrant Press in 2009. In 2009 he also published the novel Last Days (which won the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel of 2009), and the story collection Fugue State, both of which were on Time Out New York's top books of 2009. His novel, The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press), was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an IHG Award. He is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize as well as an NEA fellowship. Visit his website here for more information.}

Matt Bell, On Reading

"The only books I want to read are ones capable of getting inside me, of remaking some part of me into something better, so that the person I was before reading is unrecognizable to the new me that has read. This is the same effect I now aspire to as a writer, that I am trying to get better at creating with each progressive fiction I make."

{Matt Bell is the author of How They Were Found, forthcoming from Keyhole Press in October 2010, as well as three chapbooks, Wolf Parts (Keyhole Press), The Collectors (Caketrain Press), and How the Broken Lead the Blind (Willows Wept Press). His fiction has been selected for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories 2010 and Best American Fantasy 2. He is also the editor of The Collagist and the series editor of Dzanc's Best of the Web anthology series. Visit his website here for more information.}

Scott Garson, On Reading

"I have a seven-year old, and when it's my turn to put her to bed, I read to her from 'chapter books' that are somewhat beyond her own reading level. Right now we're reading William Pene DuBois' The Twenty-One Balloons, which is great. I read that one when I was young, but even when we're reading something new, like Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the pleasure for me is a nostalgic one. Is my own reading different? Yes and no. Nostalgia is an existential tension, if that's not too heady a thing to say. You feel, maybe deeply, what's no longer there. It's a state that can't be secured. For me that's a basic part of the appeal of all of the reading I value. Something in a voice connects with you, wholly. What is it? Where has it gone?"

{Scott Garson edits Wigleaf and is the Series Editor for the Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions annual. His collection of microfictions, American Gymnopédies, was published by Willows Wept Press. Visit his website here for more information.}

Tod Goldberg, On Reading

"When I was a child I remember being told I would never read or write above the 4th grade level. I was only six or seven at the time and was profoundly dyslexic. I was at an optometrist's office getting my eyes checked and as I sat there in the dark with my eyes dilated, the optometrist turned to my mother and told her my future as if I was incapable of understanding what he was saying. I spent the next several years in special classes filled with other kids with far more significant maladies -- cerebral palsy, missing limbs, Downs Syndrome -- and every day that I spent in those classes, and every day I spent being tormented by what I couldn't do and couldn't be, the more I wanted to simply be able to sit down and read, get swept away to a better life than what I was mired in. Of course I didn't know how hard it would be, or how long the journey, or how grand the payoff would be. I don't know if I write above a 4th grade level -- at least not according to some reviews on Amazon! -- but I surely read above that level now."

{Tod Goldberg is the author of several books, including Fake Liar Cheat, Other Resort Cities, Burn Notice: The Fix, and Burn Notice: The End Game. His novel, Living Dead Girl ,was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and his collection of short stories, Simplify, was a finalist for the SCIBA Award for Fiction and winner of the Other Voices Short Story Collection Prize. Visit his website here for more information.}