After seven years, fans of Clive Barker's Abarat series--set on the mysterious archipelago for which it's named--have the third book, Absolute Midnight (Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins, ages 13-up, September 27, 2011). Barker's latest installment brings back Candy Quackenbush, Malingo the Geshrat and John Brothers as they attempt to quash Mater Motley's plot to become Empress of the Islands. Barker's full-color illustrations bring to life the characters of this dystopian world.
On your nightstand now:
Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment by Janis A. Tomlinson.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Peter Pan.
Your top five authors:
Herman Melville; the translators of the King James Bible, because in a sense they are the authors of it--setting as they did both the style and the cadence and so on; Kenneth Grahame, the author of The Wind in the Willows, who wrote in a chapter called "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" one of the most perfectly beautiful passages about a sense of awe in the English language. It's something I would die to have written; Lorca; Yeats.
Book you've faked reading:
All of Joyce. Most of Whitman. And anything in middle English.
Book you are an evangelist for:
Anything by me.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Well, I don't think this one exists anymore, but the original cover of The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury in the American edition.
Book that changed your life:
The Bible.
Favorite line from a book:
"Call me Ishmael."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
It's a poem: "Sailing to Byzantium" by Yeats. It had a profound effect on me.