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| photo: Sigrid Estrada | |
Ann Brashares wowed audiences with her peek into the intimate and magical nature of friendship via a shared pair of jeans in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2001), and has attracted ever more fans since. Her new book, The Here and Now (Delacorte, April 8, 2014), which Shelf Awareness called "an engaging, adventurous tale," introduces an element of time travel in a romance that spans two eras and is central to saving the world. Brashares grew up in Chevy Chase, Md., and now lives in New York with her husband and four children.
On your nightstand now:
A Man in Love (Book Two of My Struggle) by Karl Ove Knausgaard; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami; an advance copy of The Geography of You and Me by Jennifer E. Smith; and two books I mean to read to my children: Cod by Mark Kurlansky and A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich
Favorite book when you were a child:
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett and the Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald.
Your top five authors:
Jane Austen. Mark Twain, Vladimir Nabokov, Gabriel García Márquez, Judy Blume. Fyodor Dostoevsky is my sixth man off the bench. Starters might be different tomorrow.
Book you've faked reading:
John Updike's Rabbit Run. I did read about the first 70 pages but couldn't stomach Rabbit's worldview longer than that.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Years ago I wouldn't shut up about David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, but he really doesn't need my help anymore. (Not that he ever did.) I still talk up Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles. I think she is one of the great writers of historical fiction.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Possession by A.S. Byatt. Turned out the inside was good, too.
Book that changed your life:
Summer Heat, a not-great first draft of a YA manuscript I read as a freshly hired editorial assistant. It changed my life not because it was good, but because it wasn't very good. It spurred my realization that writers are human beings and books are a process, sometimes messy.
Favorite line from a book:
"Yes, I think the apostle spoons could have gone as rent," said Margaret. Seeing that her aunt did not understand, she added: "You remember 'rent.' It was one of father's words--rent to the ideal, to his own faith in human nature." --E.M. Forster, Howards End
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry.