Scott Nadelson grew up in northern New Jersey and has lived in Oregon for the past 16 years; he teaches creative writing at Willamette University in Salem. He has published three collections of short stories: Aftermath, The Cantor's Daughter and Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories, and is the winner of the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award and the Oregon Book Award for short fiction. His newest book, The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress (Hawthorne Books, March 1, 2013), is a comic memoir about love, literature and loneliness.
On your nightstand now:
Barry Hannah's Long, Last, Happy. It had been years since I'd read Hannah, and revisiting these stories and hearing his mad, wise, hilarious voice again has been pure pleasure. I'm just sorry he had to die for me to find my way back to his work. Also Shadow Man by Gabriel Blackwell; a wild, metafictional romp through the hardboiled world of Hammett, Chandler and Ross Macdonald, packed with the most outrageous similes you'll ever encounter. And, finally, Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Ann Porter, which I re-read every couple of years to remind myself how deeply into the abyss a piece of literature can take us.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Goggles! by Ezra Jack Keats. Not as well known as his sublime A Snowy Day but equally mysterious and beautiful. Keats made the gritty urban landscape as magical and strange as any fantasy world. I've been reading it to my two-year-old daughter, and she loves it as much as I did.
Your top five authors:
Five is tough, but here goes: Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka, Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, Leonard Michaels. Apologies to all those I've left out.
Book you've faked reading:
William Burroughs's The Soft Machine. I was in college, trying to impress a girl in the library smoking lounge (can you believe college libraries used to have smoking lounges?). All the cool kids read Burroughs back then. I kept scanning the same page, waiting for her to look up and notice me. When she left, I tossed the book aside and never picked it up again.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer. One of the funniest books I've ever read, and also one of the smartest: on the surface, a book about not writing a book about D.H. Lawrence, it's really an exploration of procrastination, obsession, and the ways in which art can give us meaning. Also, Paula Fox's spare, gorgeous memoir The Coldest Winter, about her time as a journalist in Europe immediately following World War II.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Let Me Be the One by Elisabeth Harvor. I'd never heard of Harvor when I picked it up and have since become a big fan. The cover has an evocative photograph of two young women dressed up for a dance--white gloves, layers of lace--watched over by an matronly figure in a fur coat. All three are looking at someone off camera, the two young women with interest, the mother with skepticism, or maybe protectiveness. It didn't hurt that the cover also mentioned the book had been shortlisted for the Governor's General Award. I'm a sucker for Canadian short story writers.
Book that changed your life:
For me it's not a book but a short story, one that does in 30 pages what few novels can do in 300: "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin. I read it during a moment of post-adolescent despair, and it taught me everything I needed to know about how to live in a world of suffering, how to enter the darkness to discover the light, how to turn struggle into something beautiful.
Favorite line from a book:
From Flannery O'Connor's story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find": "'She would of been a good woman,' The Misfit said, 'if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.' "
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Beryl Markham's West with the Night. A friend had given it to me, and I started it without much expectation. But within a few pages, I was reading with my mouth hanging open; I couldn't believe what Markham did with language, how she played with form, how she balanced lyricism and narrative. Surprises on every page. I would love to experience the sense of discovery and revelation of that first read again.