Jynne Dilling Martin, publicity director at Riverhead Books, specializes in publicity for literary fiction and has worked with such luminaries as Norman Mailer, E.L. Doctorow, Junot Díaz, Khaled Hosseini, Meg Wolitzer and Gary Shteyngart. Her poetry has appeared in Granta, the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, the Boston Review and the New England Review, and has been featured on PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. She is a Yaddo fellow, winner of the 2009 Boston Review/92nd Street Y Discovery Prize and a 2013 Antarctica Artist in Residence.
On your nightstand now:
Preparation for my upcoming time in Antarctica: Water, Ice, & Stone by Bill Green and The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. You know, just some uplifting stories of snowblindness, frozen corpses and brutal cold to get me inspired for my trip!
Favorite book when you were a child:
Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door. I've been best friends with my own younger brother since we were little, so I reveled in the sibling intimacy and unspoken understanding between Meg and Charles, as well as the ferocious, feral, space-time-warping protective powers of an older sister.
Your top five authors:
Virgil, Samuel Beckett, Marianne Moore, Saint-John Perse and Edith Wharton. From which you can probably tell that the book club I'm in is not for the faint of heart.
Book you've faked reading:
Oh, shamefully countless times at publishing parties through the years, particularly when I was young and wide-eyed and scared, eating cheese cubes, drinking cheap pinot noir and desperately trying to not seem like a public school girl from inner-city Cleveland. But this fall Leah Hager Cohen is publishing a terrific short book, I Don't Know, about the power of admitting ignorance, and, true to Cohen's thesis, through the years I've learned about amazing and obscure writers when I've had the courage to say I haven't read something.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Being with Dying by the Buddhist nun Joan Halifax, which really could be titled Being with Any Kind of Enormous Life Loss. In a vein similar to Pema Chödrön and Tara Brach, Halifax invites readers to be open and tender in the face of fear and terrible loss. I have an entire stack of Being with Dying to give to friends who are going through a difficult time.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I love buying poetry based on the jacket and title: one great find was The Hour Between Dog and Wolf by Laure-Anne Bosselaar on a table at Grolier Books.
Book that changed your life:
There are probably no less than thousands of books that have changed my life, so this is an absolutely miserable question to answer. One is Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. Another is Pam Johnson-Bennett's Starting from Scratch: How to Correct Behavior Problems in Your Adult Cat. I recommend them both wholeheartedly.
Favorite line from a book:
"What will die with me the day I die? The voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?" --Jorge Luis Borges, "The Witness."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez. I'm on my third time reading it and feel completely obsessed and haunted by this story. I wish I could forget what Ricardo Laverde is listening to on his headphones as he sits and weeps, so that I could re-experience the terrible and magical moment when you first learn what he's hearing.