Peter Mattei is a writer and director who has worked in both theater and film. He's a graduate of the Yale School of Drama; his plays have been staged across the country and he has written pilots for HBO and other TV networks. His micro-budget feature Love in the Time of Money was developed at the Sundance Filmmakers Lab and produced by Robert Redford. Mattei has shown his photography and videos in galleries in New York and Texas. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Austin, Tex. His novel, The Deep Whatsis, is published by Other Press (July 23, 2013).
On your nightstand now:
Ubik by Philip K. Dick. It's something you have to keep rereading because you can't quite figure out if the section you just read was something that he wrote or something you daydreamed while reading what he actually wrote.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I'm gonna say Short Letter, Long Farewell by Peter Handke, which I read in college, and this counts because I was a child well into my 30s.
Your top five authors:
Michel Houellebecq, Raymond Chandler, Thomas Bernhard, Philip Roth, Fitzgerald, Cheever, Beckett.
Book you've faked reading:
Pretty much anything I read in grad school that could be classified as "theory."
Book you're an evangelist for:
Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner. This is the book I tell everyone to read. So go read it now.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Anything designed by John Gall.
Book that changed your life:
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. I was 22.
Favorite line from a book:
I can't remember lines from books. Really.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Tropic of Cancer.