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Nini Berndt is a graduate of the MFA program in Fiction at the University of Florida. She teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, where she lives with her wife and son. Her debut novel, There Are Reasons for This (Tin House Books, June 3, 2025), is a modern love song about the fallibility of love--in all its iterations. Claire Messud says it is "a truly memorable novel. Nini Berndt wonderfully makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. There Are Reasons for This immerses you in the unsettling but tender lives of its characters, whose yearning for connection powerfully mirrors our own."
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
There Are Reasons for This is an atmospheric, near-future dystopian queer love story that asks if desire and connection can save us from our slowly burning world.
On your nightstand now:
I just finished Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation and am furious with myself for not having read it years ago. I immediately followed it up by a rapid-fire read of Audition by Katie Kitamura, which reminded me so much of Desperate Characters by Paula Fox, one of my all-time favorites and frequent rereads. Good Girl by Aria Aber and What You Make of Me by Sophie Madeline Dess are up next. I keep Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities by my bed at all times, just in case. I had Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter next to my bed for months. I know I really love a book if I want to put it under my pillow, kiss it good night, let it seep into my head while I sleep.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I checked The Farthest-Away Mountain by Lynne Reid Banks out from the school library about once a month when I was in fifth grade. Finally, my mom bought it for me. Then it was the Weetzie Bat books by Francesca Lia Block. I was obsessed and wanted so badly to live in that glittering, sad world. It is perfect fodder for those aching teen years. I recently had a fabulous, unexpected conversation about those books, and the nostalgia was immediate.
Reading, real reading, started for me in high school after I read The Catcher in the Rye. Predictable, maybe painfully so, but true. I just hadn't known there was prose like that, really. So I followed that up with J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories, and that became my Bible. That was when I first was like, yeah, I want to be a writer, and I want to figure out how to write like this.
Your top five authors:
Grace Paley, Joy Williams, Amy Hempel, Shirley Jackson, Maggie Nelson. Those are the writers I would give my life for.
Book you've faked reading:
All James Joyce. I wrote a paper on Steinbeck's East of Eden in high school having read only the first 20 pages. We read How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayardin grad school, but I also didn't finish that book. There are a lot of books I feel confident talking about that I've read very little of.
Books you're an evangelist for:
This is where I really shine, and it's the only proselytizing I do. The Changeling by Joy Williams. After I read it, I bought copies for seven or eight people and told them we couldn't speak until they finished it. All Joy Williams, really. Go. Read her. All of it. Right now. I talk about The Lover by Marguerite Duras endlessly, especially when I'm teaching. There is just so much to learn from that book. Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles. She will never get her due. It's a book I recommend knowing people rarely love it as much as I do, but I think it's perfect. We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons. Her prose is next level. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee; yes, he won the Nobel Prize, but it still goes under-read. The Girls by John Bowen. What a fabulous little freak of a book. Other Voices, Other Rooms by Capote. It's my favorite of his, and I adore Capote.
Book you've bought for the cover:
A Little Lumpen Novelita by Roberto Bolaño, a sleeper shining jewel of a novella that caught my eye at AWP and that I could read again and again.
Book you hid from your parents:
I have no idea how I came into possession of the Story of O by Anne Desclos in high school, but I did. Victorian smut was absolutely not on my radar, but there it was, kept safely under my bed.
Book that changed your life:
I found Lydia Davis's story collection Break It Down in a bathroom stall my second year of college and read the whole thing that night. It was such a charged time for me. I don't think I really understood my literary taste yet, and reading that collection immediately unraveled me, in the best way. I was infatuated with what could happen in the space of a line, with the way words could push against each other, with the urgency of cadence, the unbelievable power of simplicity and precision in language. I wanted, needed, to be a writer then.
Favorite line from a book:
The line I think about most often is actually a whole story of Amy Hempel's, titled "Memoir": "Just once in my life--oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?"
She's a genius.
Five books you'll never part with:
Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
The Changeling by Joy Williams
Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles
Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
The Seas by Samantha Hunt
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
Sorry, it has to be eight. These are my essential texts.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. It's sublime on every read, but reading it the first time was transcendent. The unfolding of that story, the realizations, the quiet, haunting devastation--you only get that experience once.