Danielle Sosin is the author of the story
collection Garden
Primitives (Coffee House Press, 2000). Her fiction has been featured in
the Alaska Quarterly Review and on National
Public Radio. She lives in Duluth, Minn. The Long-Shining Waters (Milkweed Editions,
May 10, 2011) is her first novel.
On your nightstand now:
Tinkers by Paul Harding (my second time through); North of the Port, stories by Anthony Bukoski; Billions and Billions by Carl Sagan; Openwork by Adria Bernardi; Suite Française by Irene Nemirovsky; Recovering the Sacred by Winona LaDuke; and a number of John Scheepers seed catalogues.
Favorite book when you were a child:
My favorites were the Babar books by Laurent de Brunhoff, but my love for them wasn't so much about the stories. It was the pictures inside the book covers. Each book opened to a colored background, a sort of mottled red, or orange, yellow, blue--and a long line of elephants. The elephants formed a line by holding each other's tails in their trunks. The line twisted and turned down the page, with the smallest elephants at the top and successively larger ones marching to the bottom. I was all about that elephant parade.
Your top five authors:
Without assigning an order I'd say: Annie Dillard, Virginia Woolf, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Ondaatje, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, Paul Bowles.... Oops. Did you say five?
Book you've faked reading:
I can't say I've ever faked reading a book (I don't believe in faking), but there are many that I've put down. In a lot of cases putting a book down is not a problem for me, but there have been books that I felt I should make it through, books I wanted to love. For example, William H. Gass's The Tunnel.
Book you are an evangelist for:
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. It's one of my all-time favorite novels.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I can't think of a single one. I'm sure I've picked up plenty of books for the cover, but I always read the beginning of the book.
Book that changed your life:
Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. I was thrilled when I first read her and realized that that territory of inner life, observation, and minutiae could be made into great art and compelling reading. Her work is inspirational.
Favorite line from a book:
"Tut-tut it looks like rain." --A.A. Milne, The World of Pooh.
Book you want to read again for the first time:
The book I just wrote. Imagine getting to read your own work as if you'd never seen it before, as if you didn't know the history of every revision, and all the things between the lines that you think/hope are there. Dang, you could learn so much.