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Susan Richards Shreve is the author of More News Tomorrow (Norton, June 4, 2019), her 15th novel. She has written a memoir, 30 books for children and edited five anthologies. She is a Professor of English in the Master of Fine Arts in Fiction program at George Mason University. Shreve is one of the founders of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and, until last year, she was the foundation's chair. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim grant, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and has taught as a visiting professor at Princeton University, Columbia University School of the Arts and Goucher College. She lives in Washington, D.C.
On your nightstand now:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Border Districts by Gerald Murnane
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Levels of Life by Julian Barnes
Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout (galley)
See What Can Be Done by Lorrie Moore
So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
I have a table beside my bed with the books listed above. Underneath the table, there are stacks of other books lying in wait. From the top of the table, I've read all the books but Elizabeth Strout's galley, and I wander in Lorrie Moore's criticism. The rest are teachers--I dip in and out learning from other writers. Murnane is an Australian writer who is new to me, and I am interested in how he creates a sense of urgency in the moment, writing in first person with very little resembling a story. Jane Eyre still feels current in our lives as women. Olive Kitteridge (the first Olive) was a stunning example of Strout's deep understanding of her characters. Olive is a difficult woman but you've got to love her. Levels of Life is an astonishing story of deep connection and grief about the loss of Barnes's wife and agent. I read it again and again after my husband died, as if I were in conversation with Barnes about our shared sadness.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Little Engine That Could. I have many copies--mine when I was very young, a second copy I bought in high school to remind me, and copies for each of my four children. The Little Engine made it over the mountain to deliver Christmas toys to the children when the big engine broke down.
A classic story of victory against odds.
Your top five authors:
Leo Tolstoy
Virginia Woolf
Jane Austen
Charles Dickens
Edith Wharton
All dead--but these are the first writers from whom I learned to love books. All character-driven narratives about the lives of the living
Book you've faked reading:
Proust: Remembrance of Things Past. I have read Phyllis Rose's excellent My Year of Reading Proust and keep thinking that soon, I will read the thing itself.
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Book you're an evangelist for:
Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
Great children's literature is for all of us.
I was once on an NPR talk show with Diane Rehm discussing Charlotte's Web with a scholar of children's literature and unexpectedly, I wept when I spoke of Charlotte's death. There are many, many books that I admire but I need to be truly moved to love a book.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Vagrants by Yiyun Li
The jacket is beautiful and ominous--dark gray trees, a splash of blood red and a repeated fixed circular design in white.
This is her debut novel and it's brilliant, disturbing and more than lives up to the promise of the cover.
Book you hid from your parents:
My parents were open to anything I chose to read, especially my mother. I did however hide the very trashy True Romance magazines under my bed.
Book that changed your life:
The Great Gatsby changed my life.
The first time I read it I was in high school, completely engaged with the book until Gatsby is killed in his swimming pool. Then I was furious at Fitzgerald for giving Jay Gatsby such an undignified death.
Later understanding the novel, understanding irony in particular, I wanted to be a writer. I love a book that explodes in metaphor beyond the limitations of its story.
Favorite line from a book:
"Call me Ishmael." From Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Five books you'll never part with:
Each of these books resonates with a particular moment in my life. I still remember what captured my attention.
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile
The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
With Tess, she knew when her father died that she would never be completely happy again. I was young and that was news I didn't want to know.
In The Runaway Bunny, the Mother Bunny follows her little bunny everywhere. What comfort!
There was a moment reading The Catcher in the Rye that I found my voice--not Salinger's, nor Fitzgerald's, who was a big influence on me at that moment. I was in college and had written my first novel--something in Salinger's prose struck a chord and the formal voice of that first novel gave way to a new rhythm in my sentences that felt authentic. Maxwell's book is ultimately a memory of a moment in childhood when he failed a friend. Reading that scene, I was full of regret as if the failure had been my own.
And Shakespeare. What humanity!
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Moby-Dick. I read Moby-Dick in college on demand, found the whaling information tedious, the book too masculine. I thought the story could have been told in half the number of pages.
I am reading it now as if for the first time and though not finished, I am amazed by its range and power. An American novel equal to its subject.