Devon Ashby is Shelf Awareness's marketing and sales assistant. She is a former bookseller and video store clerk from Los Angeles, Calif. She worked at Alias Books in West L.A. and the Last Bookstore in Downtown L.A. before relocating to Seattle in 2017. She has written for Guff.com, CraveOnline, California Literary Review and Rue Morgue magazine.
On your nightstand now:
Merchants of Culture by John B. Thompson, which I borrowed from someone a long time ago and should really return; Black Gangster by Donald Goines, which is one of my boyfriend's all-time favorites; They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib; Frolic of the Beasts by Yukio Mishima.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I was obsessed with the Elfquest graphic novels for years after I discovered them at the Missoula Public Library when I was eight. I was really blown away by the concept of a comic book acknowledging things like sexuality, mental illness and systematic brutality yet still being so optimistic and fun to read.
Your top five authors:
This is impossible, of course, but the first five who come to mind are Jean Rhys, Mary Gaitskill, Banana Yoshimoto, Richard Yates and Han Kang. All of whom write about cultural alienation and suffering in ways that are vaguely surrealistic yet also painfully hyper-realistic.
Book you've faked reading:
I fake-read a lot of Bukowski in my late teens and early 20s to impress people who, I now realize, probably weren't worth the effort.
Book you're an evangelist for:
House of Psychotic Women by Kier-la Janisse is one of the weirdest, most important and most unique books about film, mental illness and gender identity that I've ever read. I also recommend Inio Asano and Shuuzou Oshimi to people a lot.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Everybody Needs a Rock by Byrd Baylor and Peter Parnall.
Book you hid from your parents:
I have always flaunted my questionable reading choices in order to deliberately frustrate and annoy my parents, except for the one time in middle school when I batch-printed an entire 200-page, multi-chapter, erotic X-Files fanfiction off the Internet and hid it in my bedroom for weeks, terrified my stepmother would find it and ban me from using the computer.
Book that changed your life:
The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor was a very important book for me in high school. Periodically re-reading the short story "Parker's Back" helped me understand how many layers of meaning a single piece of fiction can have. O'Connor's life, and her vision of spiritual redemption as a process of inevitable humiliation and self-destruction, resonated with my own, budding Mall Goth sensibilities as a teenager.
Favorite line from a book:
"There are those who feel their own strangeness and are terrified by it. They struggle toward normalcy. They suffer to exactly that degree that they are unable to appear normal to others, or to convince themselves that their aberration does not exist. These are true freaks, who appear, almost always, conventional and dull." --Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
Five books you'll never part with:
Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann, Neurosis and Human Growth by Karen Horney, Sleazoid Express by Bill Landis, The Vegetarian by Han Kang and Pure Trance by Junko Mizuno.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill, which somehow, improbably, made me actually consider possibly reading Atlas Shrugged someday (as pulp, not as political theory).
Honestly, though, most books get better the more times you read them.