Samantha Peale was born and raised in New Jersey. Her first novel, The American Painter Emma Dial, published by Norton this month, is the story of a virtuoso painter who must choose between the security of being a studio assistant to a renowned painter and an unknown future as an artist in her own right. Peale lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their two sons.On your nightstand now:
Blame by Michelle Huneven, Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon and Portraits by Michael Kimmelman.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Alice in Wonderland, Watership Down and Naked Lunch. My parents' den walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that lacked an organizing principle, at least not a discernable one; I could read any book that I could reach.
Your top five authors:
Michael Ondaatje for his generosity, particularly with women; Joan Didion for her restraint; Ernest Hemingway for his paratactic style; Alice Munroe for her decisive, self-possessed protagonists; Lydia Davis for making familiar emotional landscapes strange.
Book you've faked reading:
Hamlet. I've seen a few productions of the play, but that's it for me.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Mating by Norman Rush. Friends gave me a copy for my 23rd birthday with the proviso that it could take 50 pages to get into the story. I didn't crack the book until three years later. The first sentences hooked me:
"In Africa, you want more, I think.
People get avid. This takes different forms in different people, but it shows up in some form in everybody who stays there any length of time. It can be sudden. I include myself."
Now I read Mating annually and give the book as a gift at the slightest provocation.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Road Home by Rose Tremain. The American hardcover edition has a color photograph of a London street seen through a rain-splattered window. The image sets an elegant and provocative tone without trying to tell the story.
Book that changed your life:
The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood. David Bowie mentioned Isherwood in an interview I read when I was an adolescent. This is another volume I plucked from my parents' shelves. These two novellas set in 1930s Berlin made me yearn for a wider world and a commanding prose style of my own.
Favorite line from a book:
"I found out some time back that it's idleness breeds all our virtues, our most bearable qualities--contemplation, equableness, laziness, letting other people alone; good digestion mental and physical: the wisdom to concentrate on fleshly pleasures--eating and evacuating and fornication and sitting in the sun--than which there is nothing better, nothing to match, nothing else in all this world but to live for the short time you are loaned breath, to be alive and know it. . . . But it was only recently I have clearly seen, followed out the logical conclusion, that it is one of what we call the prime virtues--thrift, industry, independence--that breeds all the vices--fanaticism, smugness, meddling, fear, and worst of all, respectability."
From The Wild Palms by William Faulkner.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Sula by Toni Morrison. Bold, demanding, intelligent, sensual and deep.