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Kate Braverman is the author of a memoir, four novels, two story collections and four books of poetry. She is the recipient of the Economist Prize, an Isherwood Fellowship and the O. Henry Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Ben Marcus's New American Short Stories, Tobias Wolff's The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, McSweeney's, Best American, Carver, the Paris Review and elsewhere. Braverman lives in the Bay Area, and her new book is A Good Day for Seppuku: Short Stories (City Lights, February 27, 2018)
On your nightstand now:
Neuromancer by William Gibson. Collected T.S. Eliot. Residence on Earth by Neruda.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Wind in the Willows
Your top five authors:
I tend to like a single book by an author, rather than an entire oeuvre. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath. The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger. Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut. The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles.
Book you've faked reading:
Moby-Dick
Book you're an evangelist for:
El Niño by Douglas Anne Munson
Book that changed your life:
Howl by Ginsberg
Favorite line from a book:
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." --Anna Karenina by Tolstoy.
Five books you'll never part with:
1984, Orwell. Ariel, Plath. Herzog, Bellow. Brave New World, Huxley. Lolita, Nabokov.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner.
Your favorite genres:
I have a profound affection for experimentalists and genre bandits. No one assaulted the antiquated, artificial boundaries of genre better than Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Experimentalists: Vonnegut always. Joyce Carol Oates. Donald Barthelme. Science fiction, an ignored genre fueled by prophetic imagination: James Tiptree Jr., Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Chip Delany.