Reading Lists
John Cheever once said, "A page of good prose remains invicible." Reading and writing are inseparable for me. Over the years I have tried to absorb as much literary fiction as possible. I would say that the following books transformed me:
A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; The Jazz Party by Milan Kundera
Sophie's Choice by William Styron
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The World According to Garp by John Irving
Lay of the Land by Richard Ford
The Doomsters by Ross Macdonald
The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black
Sunset Park; The New York Trilogy; Moon Palace by Paul Auster
Winter in the Blood by James Welch
Light in August by William Faulkner
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Dreamer by Charles Johnson
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
The photo below is the cover art for The Reclusives. By Bill Havranek.
A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; The Jazz Party by Milan Kundera
Sophie's Choice by William Styron
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The World According to Garp by John Irving
Lay of the Land by Richard Ford
The Doomsters by Ross Macdonald
The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black
Sunset Park; The New York Trilogy; Moon Palace by Paul Auster
Winter in the Blood by James Welch
Light in August by William Faulkner
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Dreamer by Charles Johnson
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
The photo below is the cover art for The Reclusives. By Bill Havranek.
A reviewer was an archeologist. On the other hand, writing that novel was like being the first person to graffito a cave with hieroglyphics. He wanted to be the studied, not the studier. No matter how many credits his job of reviewing received, its debits far outweighed them and he couldn't help but think he was in some horrible debt that had consumed him. Years had passed criticizing prosaic texts written by average people and he was beginning to think that he needed to become ordinary as well. Or already had. Excerpt from"Edible Harmonica" in The Reclusives
Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, Vermont. Where I studied for my M.A. in English and M.Litt. in African-American Studies.
