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| photo: Jean-Yves Ducornet | |
The author of nine novels, three collections of short fiction, two books of essays and five books of poetry, Rikki Ducornet has received both a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. She has illustrated books by Robert Coover, Jorge Luis Borges, Forrest Gander and Joanna Howard. Her paintings have been exhibited widely, including, most recently, at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, Mass., and the Salvador Allende Museum in Santiago, Chile.
In Brightfellow (Coffee House Press, July 5, 2016), a feral boy comes of age on a college campus decadent with starched sheets, sweating cocktails and homemade jams. Brightfellow is a fragrant, voluptuous novel of imposture, misplaced affection and the many ways we are both visible and invisible to one another.
On your nightstand now:
The Battle for Home by Marwa Al-Sabouni. This is a magnificent book! And a necessary one. With passionate grace, Marwa Al-Sabouni reveals the profound connection that exists between place, memory, architecture, identity, culture and politics. With exemplary clarity, she reveals how a country--in this case Syria--and a city--her city, the city of Homs--collapses as secular and sacred traditions are brought down, building by building, neighborhood by neighborhood. One reads this book holding one's breath, weeping.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Alice in Wonderland ties with Hendrik Van Loon's Ancient Man--a book that very much informs my new novel. Alice taught me all I needed to know about abusive authority, and Ancient Man (packed with information and a worldview that is now outdated) convinced me at the age of six that our species is capable of dreaming a vast and important dream.
Your top five authors:
Lewis Carroll leaps into my mind at once as Alice gave me the courage to think my own thoughts! As does William Gass. His novel Omensetter's Luck--one of THE great American novels--is one of the reasons I became a writer. Gaston Bachelard, whose many beautiful books, above all The Poetics of Space, has provided an ongoing conversation from the beginning. If my first four novels are sparked by the four elements, Bachelard is to blame. Franz Kafka! The one, above all others, who dared look tyranny in the face and laugh. And lastly (but, you know, the list sprawls and the top actually swarms with writers!) Murasaki Shikibu approaches, in very small, precise steps I imagine, with eyes on fire! I have spent many long months of my life reading and rereading her Tale of Genji--the world's first novel--written over a thousand years ago!
Book you've faked reading:
I have never faked reading a book. But I have, from time to time, FAKED a book, always written by the great, if long dead, Von Feffertits, who has written about everything from Michelangelo to crop circles.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and even before I come to its final pages, Marwa Al-Sabouni's The Battle for Home.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Sándor Márai's Embers.
Book you hid from your parents:
There is a little book of obscene photographs from Pompeii that my father hid in his sock drawer. I had nothing to hide, but that book was hidden, unsuccessfully, from me.
Book that changed your life:
For Your Own Good by Alice Miller.
Favorite line from a book:
"A creature that hides... in its shell... is preparing temporal explosions, not to say whirlwinds of being." --The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
"You're nothing but a pack of cards!" --Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Five books you'll never part with:
The Poetics of Space and Water and Dreams by Gaston Bachelard
Les Jardins d'Adonis by Marcel Detienne
Ka by Roberto Calasso
Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Ka by Roberto Calasso
Best book to receive from a lover:
Ka by Roberto Calasso