Dawn Raffel is the author of the novel Carrying the Body and the story collection In the Year of Long Division. A new collection, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, will be published March 16 by Dzanc. She was a fiction editor for many years and was executive articles editor at O magazine and editor at large at More magazine. She is currently editor-at-large, books, at Reader's Digest and an adjunct assistant professor in the MFA program at Columbia University. She lives near New York City with her husband and sons.
On your nightstand now:
Jane Eyre (I belong to a group of writers who are rereading the classics together), Becoming Jane Eyre by Sheila Kohler, A Common Pornography by Kevin Sampsell, Petersburg by Andrei Bely and Hard Times by Studs Terkel, which I'm using as research for a book I'm writing.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton.
Your top five authors:
Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, Grace Paley, Leo Tolstoy, the Brothers Grimm.
Five living women writers whose short stories you wish everyone would read:
Christine Schutt, Diane Williams, Terese Svoboda, Deb Olin Unferth, Laura van den Berg.
Secret affection:
George R.R. Martin's bestselling fantasy series A Song of Fire and Ice.
Book you've faked reading:
That would be the dog-training manual. I hope my husband doesn't see this.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece before he became wildly famous.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Weird Wisconsin by Linda S. Godfrey and Richard D. Hendricks, bought at Renaissance Books in the Milwaukee airport.
Book that changed your life:
War and Peace. I came across it in a library when I was a disaffected 13-year-old and had no idea what it was, other than that it promised largeness. By the time I finished, my mind had been rearranged and I'd developed incurable Russophilia. I've now read it four times, and I'm sure I'll be back.
Favorite line from a book:
"We must risk delight."--Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
War and Peace.
