Terese Svoboda is the author of 14 books, including Trailer Girl and Other Stories, which appears in paper this month (Bison Books, December 2009), plus her fifth book of poetry, Weapons Grade (University of Arkansas), which was published in September, and her fifth and sixth novels, Pirate Talk or Mermalade (Dzanc Press, 2010) and Bohemian Girl (Bison Books, 2011). She worked her way into the book business as a magician's assistant, legal secretary and filmmaker, and lives in New York City with her husband, son and two difficult dogs.
On your nightstand now:
Where is that nightstand? You'd I think I have never recovered from all those years I slept on a mattress on the floor and the books slid under the covers with whomever. I'm wallowing in the collected poetry of James Wright and Stanley Plumly for a talk I have to give. For fun there's the very sharp Lydia Millet's My Happy Life, about an abused woman abandoned in a mental institution and a drunken pornographer who thinks he's the messiah. I'm making room for the new Coetzee, Summertime, and Abdourahman Waberi's In the United States of Africa. I read until I fall asleep, hoping to absorb genius without any effort. Instead I have a great time writing books in my dreams and forget every word by the time I'm awake.
Favorite book when you were a child:
My grandmother gave me 10 cents for every book I read in the summer. I quickly figured out that poetry books were the thinnest. When I was older and realized I was cast adrift on the plains, I read everything by Bess Streeter Aldrich and of course that great Kansan escape epic, The Wizard of Oz. Mutiny on the Bounty--yes!
Your top five authors:
Donald Barthelme; Nicholson Baker; Dervla Murphy, whose walking tours of the remote inspire and terrify; Russell Edson; and Muriel Spark.
Book you've faked reading:
Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. It's like the pendulum swinging, I fall asleep and do whatever anyone asks me after. Like free associate.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Reinaldo Arenas's The Assault, a sci-fi about killing your mother. It's fierce. Give him a big posthumous prize: he died of AIDS after being kicked out of Cuba.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France, the cover (and plates) illustrated by Frank C. Pape. A big-breasted sphinx cradles Pan while two bad cherubs beat each other up at their feet, all in embossed gold. Inside, a plate showing an angel bashing Monsieur Sariette over the head with a book!
Book that changed your life:
One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book so true to a culture that it widened my own. My biggest aspiration was to travel to South America to live that book. But instead of walking through Latin America under Gabriel Garcia Marquez's spell, I spent six months in the South Pacific and a year in Africa. Wrong boat? I discovered surreal magic emanates from all villages.
Favorite line from a book:
Tolstoy's "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Coming from a very large family, I like to think we're way more unique.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. It appalls, page by page. Also Barthelme's The Dead Father. Such a lascivious sex scene in amongst all that frivolity. Or maybe Muriel Spark's Memento Mori. Those old people, so catty, so fun. Or Marguerite Duras's The Lover, where nothing is clear except emotion.