Morgan Talty is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation. His debut short story collection, Night of the Living Rez, won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the New England Book Award, and the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Honor. Talty is an assistant professor of English in Creative Writing and Native American and Contemporary Literature at the University of Maine, Orono, and he is on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing as well as the Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Levant, Maine. His debut novel, Fire Exit (Tin House, June 4, 2024) centers on one man navigating issues of family and compassionately addresses tough choices in matters of family and lore.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
You ever wonder what it's like to watch your biological child grow up across a river and that child does not know?
On your nightstand now:
The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck and Until August by Gabriel García Márquez. Ben is great and I'll be talking to him in person for an event in Maine when his book is released, and Márquez is... Márquez!
Favorite book when you were a child:
I hated books.
Your top five authors:
Richard Van Camp (It's okay if you don't know him. Now you do. Go read The Lesser Blessed immediately and then everything else he has written.)
Alice Munro (Like, come on--who does it better?)
Anton Chekhov (Okay, maybe Anton does it better, but whatever.)
Colson Whitehead (Colson's work is so damn good you'd think he was the only writer writing and able to do what a writer does.)
Louise Erdrich (A huge name author, Native, but deserves so much more respect--she is a powerhouse of a storyteller.)
Book you've faked reading:
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson. When people ask why they should read it, I say, Because "Fuckhead," that's why.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin.
Book you hid from your parents:
We didn't read. I did hide snubbed-out cigarettes and ashes in my Avril Lavigne CD case.
Book that changed your life:
Not a book, but short story: "Gusev" by Anton Chekhov.
Favorite line from a book:
The opening to Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses: "The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door."
Those beats!
Five books you'll never part with:
The Lesser Blessed by Richard Van Camp (I'll go to jail before I give it away.)
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (Isn't it pretty to think you'd be able to snatch this from my hands?)
Felix S. Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law (reference text that costs a lot of money and is by no means a "handbook"--it's a thick text I'd use to fend off anyone coming for the books I have listed here.)
The Round House by Louise Erdrich (You just can't have it.)
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy (I've written all over that book and for that reason you're not getting it.)
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The entire Cemetery of Forgotten Books series by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Man--he left this world far too soon.