Jessica Francis Kane is the author of
the story collection Bending
Heaven. Her first novel, The Report, will be published by Graywolf Press in
September 2010. Her stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio and have appeared
in many publications, including McSweeney's, the Missouri Review, the Virginia
Quarterly Review and the Michigan
Quarterly Review. Her essays and humor
pieces have be featured in McSweeney's, Internet Tendency and the Morning News, where she is a contributing writer. She
lives in New York with her husband and their two children.
On your nightstand now:
The latest issues of Lapham's Quarterly and the VQR, which I increasingly treat as books that must be read beginning to end, not magazines to be perused. They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell. The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst. The author questionnaire that I need to fill out for Portobello Books, which is bringing out The Report in England next year. A beautiful blue and green notebook made for me by a friend who is an artist (in fact, she designed the illustrations that grace the inside covers of the Graywolf edition of my novel). And "The Book of Love," a present from my daughter, age 7. She wrote it herself, in crayon, and stapled the pages. Mostly it repeats over and over that she loves me, her father and her brother, so I'm pretty sure it's going to stay on my nightstand forever.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Arundel by Kenneth Roberts. It is a historical novel about the Continental Army's assault on British Quebec during the American Revolution. I adored the depiction of the grueling march through the Maine wilderness led by a heroic Benedict Arnold in his pre-traitor days. I did my very own reenactments in the Connecticut woods at my grandmother's house, circa 1981.
Your top five authors:
Favorite authors, favorite books--the very thought of choosing makes my mind go blank! But here goes: F. Scott Fitzgerald was probably the first, for showing me how sentences could be written. Penelope Fitzgerald for revealing how humor and pathos could be intertwined. Graham Greene for everything, really. The last two spots will have to be shared by George Eliot, Dickens, Chekov and Alice Munro, in no particular order. Sorry to break the rules.
Book you've faked reading:
The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. I faked it for a class in college, though I did ultimately finish it after graduation. It took me a long time, as I recall, though that was a good thing because I was working in publishing in New York and didn't have any money for other entertainments.
Book you're an evangelist for:
According to Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge. A novel about the last years of Samuel Johnson's life in which Bainbridge writes sentences Johnson could have written. I think it is a beautiful novel, so poignant in the way it handles time and reveals what the same event can mean to different people.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Pink Fairy Book. There was a whole series of them, all different colors, but I only had the pink one.
Book that changed your life:
There was this big hardcover book of ghost stories in my parents' library when I was little. The jacket was bright yellow and I loved it. I didn't read the stories until many years later, but the reason the book changed my life is because it inspired a game I played. The game was that I had been given a homework assignment to write a story, and after much worry and procrastination (such verisimilitude!), what I pretended to turn in the next day was... the great yellow book of ghost stories! Binding, jacket, and all. I had a very optimistic sense of how long it takes to make a book, obviously (let alone write one), but I never got tired of playing that game. I guess in some sense I'm still not tired of it.
Where do you work?
Almost exclusively in libraries. A long time ago I suspected I would be susceptible to over-fetishizing the writer's desk, and so I decided it might be better not to have one. I think on the whole I've gotten more work done this way, though some days I wander in search of the right atmosphere (no eaters, no loud talkers). I do have a book of photographs of writers at their desks that my husband gave me (Eudora Welty is my favorite, the lift of her chin so defiant). So maybe one day I'll relent....
Favorite line from a book:
"Jim was born in a white house on a green corner."--from "The Jelly-Bean" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Maybe it doesn't seem like much, but the transparency of this opened a whole world for me, that a sentence could be that simple and yet say so much.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Choices by Mary Lee Settle. I remember that after I finished it, I started my first-ever fan letter. I never sent it, though, and I really wish I had. She died a few years later.