This month at TheReadingRoom.com we’re celebrating the authors who take us under the superficial sheen of the Nordic metropolises like Stockholm and Reykjavík to show us underworlds as harsh as Scandinavia’s vast tracts of uninhabitable land. Writers of Scandinavian Crime Fiction take us through these icy worlds, where night is often longer than day and there are parts so inhospitable astronauts are trained there, through hard boiled protagonists that wouldn’t be out of place in the work of Raymond Chandler and other Classic Crime authors. Now, when we think about Scandinavian Crime Fiction, most of us think Stieg Larsson’s brilliant …
Who are your favorite authors? Glen David Gold, Diana Wynne Jones, George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, John Irving Who has had a major influence on your writing? My grandfather was a brawler from Boston with a fondness for poems like “Evangeline” and short stories like “The Moon Is Down.” He loved language and taught me to do the same. Other big influences might be Madeleine L’Engle, Frank Herbert, Stephen King, and the illustrations of Arthur Rackham and Ivan Bilibin. I bow down before the world-building genius of Holly Black and George R.R. Martin. Name a book you never finished? I …
Who are your favorite authors? I think favourite authors depend on where you are in life. At fifteen, Alexandre Dumas and Colette were it. At 20, I was very into feminist literature. By twenty-five, I yearned for Jilly Cooper to write a new book. at thirty-seven, I was glued to any book on how to have a good, healthy pregnancy. Now….I love Scandinavian thrillers, Michael Connolly, Marian Keyes and Maeve Binchy, and am very cross because Malcolm Gladwell hasn’t written a book for ages. Who has had a major influence on your writing? Probably all of the above in some …
Who are your favorite authors? Flaubert, George Eliot, Chekhov, Nabokov, Marquez, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, William Maxwell, Patrick White, Carver, E.L. Doctorow, Richard Ford, Shirley Hazzard, Marilynne Robinson, Brian Castro, JM Coetzee, Gerald Murnane, David Malouf, Alice Munro…(I could fill several pages…) Who has had a major influence on your writing? All of the books I’ve ever read and the books I’m yet to read. Name a book you never finished? There are too many to name. But there are also a great many I’ve read and re-read over and over again. What word or words do you always have …
Who are your favorite authors? My favorite authors writing today are Jane Gardam and ElizabethtStrout. I’m also a huge fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mary McCarthy. Who has had a major influence on your writing? All good writing influences me. For that matter, so does bad writing in that it makes me cringe and scour my own work for infelicities and embarrassments. Name a book you never finished? They’re too numerous to list. Given the amount of research I have to do for my own books, I don’t like to spend my “pure pleasure” reading time on something that …
