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| photo: Krista Hoeppner Leahy | |
Hannah Gersen's debut novel is Home Field (Morrow, July 26, 2016). She is a staff writer for The Millions, and has written for many publications, including the New York Times, the Southern Review and Granta.com. She lives in New York City.
On your nightstand now:
My big reading project this year has been to reread In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, so one of those volumes is always on my nightstand. Right now, I'm finishing up the third volume, The Guermantes Way. I'm also reading Oliver Sacks's memoir, On the Move, and have been dipping in and out of The Hour of Land by Terry Tempest Williams, which is a collection of beautiful essays about our national parks, and the natural world in general.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The first book I remember getting really excited about was Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends. I thought his poems were hilarious, and I memorized a bunch of them because they were so much fun to recite.
I also loved fairy tales, especially the Grimm versions, which were always very gruesome and stark.
When I was a little older, I was deeply attached to the Anne of Green Gables series by L.M. Montgomery, and read the first volume over and over again, especially when I was feeling angsty and needed a dose of Anne Shirley's romantic worldview.
Your top five authors:
It is hard to narrow them down to just five but here goes: John Cheever, Jamaica Kincaid, Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy and Evelyn Waugh.
Book you've faked reading:
Great Expectations was the first reading assignment I ever skipped. I was asked to read it in ninth grade English, but gave up after a few chapters. I've attempted to read it and a couple other Dickens novels a few times since, but the only story of his that I really love is A Christmas Carol. 
Book you're an evangelist for:
Talk Stories by Jamaica Kincaid. This is a collection of Jamaica Kincaid's early, unsigned "Talk of the Town" pieces for the New Yorker. Not only do they give a lively portrait of New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they also show how Kincaid's voice developed, and eventually led to her beautiful and striking fiction.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I love it when publishers come out with pocket-sized editions of books because they remind me of the paperbacks I carried around when I was teenager. Last summer I bought a copy of Jess Walter's The Financial Lives of the Poets on impulse because it was reissued in a small size with a simple red cover, and also because I had such a good time reading Beautiful Ruins.
Book you hid from your parents:
My parents didn't censor my reading, but my mother looked down on YA series like the Baby-Sitters Club, so if I wanted to read those, I did that on my lunch break at school.
Book that changed your life:
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. That's why I'm reading it again now. I learned so much about writing from this book the first time--and so much about art, politics, social life, private life, love, jealousy and friendship. It's so expansive and full of life; I can't recommend it highly enough.
Favorite line from a book:
"We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves." --from In Search of Lost Time, Vol 2. by Marcel Proust
Five books you'll never part with:
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
The Collected Stories of John Cheever
The World According to Garp by John Irving
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. I read this book in my early 20s after reading several of Waugh's early satirical novels, which are short, wickedly funny and narrated in perfect sentences. (Waugh once said he puts words on the page and then "pushes them around a little.") I expected Brideshead Revisited to be in the same vein, but it was completely different: epic and nostalgic with gorgeous prose that sometimes goes over the top. I loved being pulled into the world of this book and wish I could re-create the delight I felt when I first started reading it.