This morning’s Shelf Awareness - the excellent daily e-newsletter for the booktrade - has an interview with Jonathan Miles, the author of Dear American Airlines. I started reading the book last night and the reviews are spot-on. It’s a great book. Here’s the interview (lifted from Shelf - hope you don’t mind, John?)
Jonathan Miles is the cocktails columnist for the New York Times and books columnist for Men’s Journal. His journalism, essays and literary criticism have appeared in many publications, including the New York Times Book Review, GQ, the New York Observer and the Oxford American, and have been selected many times for the Best American Sports Writing and Best American Crime Writing anthologies. Houghton Mifflin has just published his first novel, Dear American Airlines. A former longtime resident of Oxford, Miss., he lives in Warwick, N.Y., with his family.
On your nightstand now:
A tottering mess of galleys, magazines, a puppy-training guide, and, for a current project, two histories of trash disposal in America. But I always keep one book there for pure pleasure. Right now it’s Neal Polk’s restored edition of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Stone Fox by John Reynolds Gardiner. I used to endlessly re-read it to see if maybe maybe the dog wouldn’t always die in the end. The dog always did. Dammit.
Your top five authors:
William Faulkner, Jim Harrison, Joseph Mitchell, John Updike, Greil Marcus.
Book you’ve faked reading:
Every book assigned to me in high-school English classes–seriously, all of ‘em–except for Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. That one sneaked through and upturned my life. A few months after reading it, I headed to Mississippi.
Book you are an evangelist for:
Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale. In fact, I just preached about it last night to a French girl who was sitting beside me on a plane. Sometimes I don’t trust that people will actually follow up on my recommendation so I buy it for them. Not for the French girl, though. I just wrote the title in the back of her Lonely Planet: USA guidebook.
Book you’ve bought for the cover:
Zbigniew Herbert’s The Collected Poems 1956-1998. The cover shows Herbert, on a black background, lighting up a cigarette. He looks like he’s about to tell you something worth knowing, which in fact he was.
Book that changed your life:
See As I Lay Dying, above.
Favorite line from a book:
The final line of Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile: “And then the storm of shit begins.”
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Barry Hannah’s Bats Out of Hell. That collection showed me what you could do with language–as with an electric guitar, you could run it through a distortion pedal, add some reverb, crank up the amp volume, make it scream and howl, wake the neighbors.
Book that required multiple readings to appreciate:
Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter. Tried reading it in my early 20s. Yawn. Revisited it a few years later. Yawn again. I took another stab at it in my 30s, when I’d had some life behind me, some disappointments, some scar tissue on the heart. And then I downed it in one big awestruck gulp.
(I think Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter is the most boring book in the world)
