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Steve Almond is the author of a dozen books, including Candyfreak and Against Football. He's the recipient of an NEA grant for 2022 and teaches creative writing at Harvard and Wesleyan. His work has been published in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mysteries and the New York Times Magazine. After 30 years of writing terrible novels, he says, he finally wrote one that doesn't suck: All the Secrets of the World (Zando).
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
All the Secrets of the World is a mashup of Jane Eyre and Breaking Bad. It's got sex, mayhem, astrology and scorpions. Plus a kick-ass teen heroine.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Joy of Sex (illustrated).
Your top five authors:
Meg Wolitzer (The Wife is a modern masterpiece.)
Megha Majumdar (A Burning is my favorite novel of the past five years.)
Natasha Trethewey (Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir completely wrecked me. Astonishing.)
Per Olov Enquist (Swedish writer. I re-read his novel The Visit of the Royal Physician every year.)
George Saunders (For his wild imagination and his unrelenting humanity.)
Book you've faked reading:
The Western canon.
Book you're an evangelist for:
I wrote a whole book about the novel Stoner by John Williams called William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes.
Book you hid from your parents:
The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts, which I stole off the shelf in my dad's study. I never read the book. I just liked the title.
Book that changed your life:
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I read it early in high school, and I was amazed that a novel could be funny as hell and sad as hell at the same time.
Favorite line from a book:
From the novel Stoner by John Williams:
"In his extreme youth [William] Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart."
Five books you'll never part with:
In addition to the ones cited above, let's go with:
Towelhead by Alicia Erian
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Father's Day by Matthew Zapruder
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I'll go with The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz, because it has such a delicious twist at the end.
Whether purchasing your new novel, All the Secrets of the World, from an indie bookstore is actually tax-deductible:
Possibly.