‘I first read Raymond Carver as a teenager and found his stories too emotionally spare’ … Curtis Sittenfeld. Photograph: Jenn Ackerman
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Curtis Sittenfeld: ‘Sweet Valley High is not respected – but I found the books riveting’
The American Wife author on The Snowman, Saturday Night Live and her lifelong love of Alice Munro
Curtis Sittenfeld Friday 22 October 2021
My earliest reading memory The Snowmanby Raymond Briggs, a picture book I pored over while waiting in an auto body shop for my mother’s car to be fixed. I think I was four.
In her memoir Living History, Hillary Clinton introduces her husband, Bill Clinton, as "the person who would cause my life to spin in directions that I could never have imagined."
Is it me, or does the word "spin" conjure a car spinning off the road?
Curtis Sittenfeld's new novel, Rodham,imagines what would have happened if she had righted the wheel. Rodham is a nauseating, moving, morally suggestive, technically brilliant book that made me think more than any other in recent memory about the aims and limits of fiction.
Best summer books 2018, as picked by writers and cultural figures – part six
From Pulitzer prize-winners to Penguin classics, poetry anthologies to the latest page-turners, here are the books to take to the beach this summer
Sun 8 Jul 2018 09.00 BST
Patrick Gale
Anyone who endured their teens in the 1970s as I did will devour Nina Stibbe’s sequel to the equally delicious Man at the Helm. Funny, subversive and unexpectedly touching, Paradise Lodge(Penguin), just out in paperback, follows her heroine’s adventures when she bunks off school to work in an old people’s home ripe for Thatcherite reforms. I’m always banging on about the need to read more dead authors – they have nobody marketing their work and they’re cheap and usually brilliant. Please discover Sylvia Townsend Warner this summer. Her The Flint Anchor and The Corner That Held Them (Virago) are neglected comic masterpieces whose evocations of chilly East Anglian landscapes are the perfect balm for sunburn. I’ll get no holiday as I’ve a new novel out, but on my train journeys I’ll be reading Anne Enright in preparation for interviewing her at the North Cornwall book festival.
Geoff Dyer
I’ll be in Berlin for most of July, heading there via – or at least in the company of – Antony Beevor’s Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944 (Viking). Always worried that I have a book too few, I’ll also be lugging Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry (Granta), Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett (Fitzcarraldo) and Iris Origo’s Tuscan diaries, War in Val D’Orcia (Pushkin). In the second world war, the Germans used 2.7m horses, of which 1.8m died. This is just one of many moving statistics in Ulrich Raulff’s unusual and stimulating history of – and elegy for – the last 100 years of our relationship with the equine world, Farewell to the Horse (Penguin, translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp).
Curtis Sittenfeld
Who Is Rich? (Fourth Estate) by Matthew Klam is a terrific summer read – a cartoonist at an ocean-side artists’ conference ponders creativity, infidelity and his own existential purpose, and the results are hilarious and bracingly intelligent. A similarly artsy but more sober read is the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (Mariner) by Alexander Chee. Chee’s insights about writing, love and activism are hard-won, honest and incredibly wise. I can’t wait to get my hands on the new novel When Katie Met Cassidy (Piatkus) by Camille Perri. I’ve heard it’s sexy, entertaining and subversive, and doesn’t that sound like a magnificent combination? I plan to read it while visiting my sister in Providence, Rhode Island.
Kerry Hudson
This summer I’m fulfilling a long-held ambition to explore the mountains and cities of the Republic of Georgia by their marshrutka countrywide minibus network. On a trip that is mainly travel, I want books that will inspire me, that are humane and thought-provoking. After reading the first outstanding story, I’ve been impatiently hoarding Glen James Brown’s debut, Ironopolis (Parthian), a series of interconnected tales set on a dilapidated Middlesbrough council estate. Likewise, Mary O’Hara’s Austerity Bites (Policy Press), which reports on the frontline of austerity cuts, a book sadly as relevant today as when it was first published four years ago.
Ocean Vuong
The Wilderness (WW Norton) by Sandra Lim is a knife blade fashioned into a magnifying glass. Oscillating between bold declarations and restrained, seething fury, the poems slowly build to a storm in the psyche. The book is a masterclass in line-making and metaphor. It lifts me, like the best books, higher into myself. “When I come to the right place, I believe I’ll paint a door on it and / walk right through.” I’ve also been struck by Scott McClanahan’s The Sarah Book (Tyrant). It is the epitome of autofiction – and advances the tradition to include images and photographs. But more than that, it is the first book I’ve read in a while that faithfully enacts Kafka’s truism that a book must be an axe that shatters the frozen seas inside us. Brutal and unforgiving, it explores a crumbling marriage and its ensuing existential crisis through the lens of the West Virginian working class. A classic of urgent, American storytelling.
Josie Rourke
Sally Rooney’s award-winning novel, Conversations With Friends (Faber), is one of the best debuts I’ve encountered. It’s a witty and entrancing read, perfect for a summer’s day spent doing nothing else. I’m hoping to visit friends in the Hudson Valley this summer; I first need to finish editing my film Mary Queen of Scots – which is based on John Guy’s biography of Mary Stuart, My Heart Is My Own(Harper). For my summer reading I will dive into Stephen Greenblatt’s new book, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (WW Norton). I love his mission to invigorate settled ideas, and it’s good preparation for the next play I’m directing, Measure for Measure at the Donmar, London.
Sebastian Faulks
I have enjoyed The Incurable Romantic (Little, Brown), in which psychotherapist Frank Tallis opens his casebook. There have been quite a few such books recently, most of them overpraised and not as well written as their admirers claim. But Tallis writes with clarity and wit about the morbid condition of love, which emerges here as a kind of mental disorder. I have some misgivings about patient confidentiality and exaggeration and/or light fictionalisation in places (Tallis has form as a horror novelist), but this is undoubtedly riveting stuff.
Attica Locke
I’ve just put down The Kiss Quotient (Atlantic) by Helen Hoang and I loved it so much I want to hand it out to strangers on the street. It’s a beautiful love story and a peek inside the life and heart of a woman who has Asperger’s or high-functioning autism. I was mesmerised by this book, which manages to be steamy hot and sweet at the same time. An American Marriage (Algonquin) by Tayari Jones is another incredible love story, though fraught with greater challenges for the couple at the centre, which makes the story all the more moving. Jones’s prose is chock-full of lyricism, grace and wisdom. You will never forget the story of Celestial and Roy. Unfortunately, there are no grand travel plans for me this season. My summer “holiday” will be stolen moments in my favourite reading chair.
Sabrina Mahfouz
I read The One Who Wrote Destiny (Atlantic) by Nikesh Shukla, a beautiful, brilliant modern classic, cover to cover on one long-haul flight – take tissues! And Mr Loverman (Hamish Hamilton) by Bernardine Evaristo is the funniest book I’ve read this year, but also one of the saddest. Every character makes a perfect holiday companion. My summer travels are all work-related this year – Wales, Suffolk, Edinburgh and Cairo – so to see me through the trains, planes and buses, I’ll be packing When I Hit You (Atlantic) by Meena Kandasamy, Grime Kids (Orion) by DJ Target, Elsewhere, Home (Telegram) by Leila Aboulela and Things Bright and Beautiful(Penguin) by Anbara Salam.
Carol Morley
Sara Baume’s A Line Made By Walking (Windmill), about Frankie, who retreats from urban life and connects with nature, really made an impression on me this year. A fun and breezy read was Charlotte Bingham’s memoir MI5 and Me: A Coronet Among the Spooks (Bloomsbury), an account of her discovery that her father was a spy and of her own “inactive” service. Go Went Gone (Granta, translated by Susan Bernofsky) by Jenny Erpenbeck, looking at the plight of asylum seekers as told through a retired university professor, I found very moving. My dream holiday reads include The Overstory (William Heinemann) by Richard Powers, an eco epic, with trees at the heart of the storytelling, and Ling Ma’s Severance(Macmillan), a brilliant-sounding post-apocalyptic novel, centring on the end times of late capitalism. I’ve been learning to swim this year, and while I’m in Paxos practising my strokes, I’ve accumulated some books with swimmers on the covers, and top of the pile to read is Turning: Lessons from Swimming Berlin’s Lakes (Virago) by Jessica J Lee.
From moving memoirs to far-reaching fiction, the wonders of science and the lessons of history, novelists, poets and critics pick their best reads of the year
Sat 26 Nov 2017
Paul Murray
First Love; A State of Freedom; Lincoln in the Bardo
Gwendoline Riley’s First Love (Granta) tells the story of a young woman in an abusive relationship. It goes to some dark places, but Riley’s prose is so electric, so alive with humour and insight and passion, that by the end you will want to stand up and cheer. A State of Freedom (Chatto & Windus) by Neel Mukherjee also shows people living at their limit; it’s a brave and frequently devastating novel whose themes of displacement and dehumanisation are all too timely. I read it six months ago but the part about the bear still gives me the shivers. Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury) was every bit as wonderful as I expected from the great George Saunders.
Emma Healey
Little Labours; You Will Know Me
A friend gave me Little Labours (4th Estate) by Rivka Galchen after my daughter was born in June. It’s a funny, profound memoir that’s sort of about what it’s like to be a new mother, but is really about lots of other things including Japanese literature and the freedom to judge others. It’s also a very short book, written in brief, titled sections, and therefore ideal for sleep-deprived parents. I’m a huge fan of Megan Abbott and loved You Will Know Me (Picador) just as much as her previous explorations into the dark, disturbing, strangely heroic world of teenage girls. She’s the queen of the uncanny analogy (someone carves a ham, “pink as a newborn”) and knows just how to draw the reader into the characters’ dangerous, painful lives and how to make those lives mysterious. Her newest novel is intriguing and entertaining from the first page.
Helen Simpson
Go, Went, Gone; Midwinter Break; Conversations With Friends
Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone (a title catchier in the original, Gehen, Ging, Gegangen) (Granta) is a deeply thoughtful and involving novel about migrancy now. Retired ex-GDR classics professor Richard, himself unhoused by war in infancy, befriends a group of African refugees in Berlin: grippingly interrogatory fiction. Bernard MacLaverty’s Midwinter Break (Jonathan Cape) shows a five-decade marriage unspooling over a long weekend in Amsterdam; 26-year-old Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends (Faber) is a latterday Bonjour Tristesse: brave and touching love stories, both of them.
Curtis Sittenfeld
The History of the Future; The Rules Do Not Apply
There are two 2017 books of nonfiction that have really stayed with me. The History of the Future (Coffee House Press) by Edward McPherson is a collection of impressively researched yet conversational essays about environmental degradation, place and time. The Rules Do Not Apply (Little, Brown) by Ariel Levy is simultaneously the personal story of a dramatic miscarriage, a frank, powerful look at shifting gender roles and how we make a life for ourselves, and an inside glimpse into Levy’s work as a journalist for the New Yorker.
Taiye Selasi
Things That Happened Before the Earthquake; Always Another Country; Freshwater
Chiara Barzini’s Things That Happened Before the Earthquake (Doubleday) strikes that rarest balance: a brilliant literary novel with all the effortless delights of a beach read. It’s a new-girl-in-town Bildungsroman that follows a precocious Italian teenager through 1990s Los Angeles. Sisonke Msimang’s Always Another Country (Jonathan Ball) is my favourite kind of memoir, so lyrical and dreamlike that it reads like a novel. It’s an artful meditation on exile and return, womanhood and motherhood unfolding against the backdrop of post-apartheid South African politics. Freshwater (Grove Atlantic) by Akwaeke Emezi is sheer perfection: sexy, sensual, spiritual, wise. One of the most dazzling debuts I’ve ever read. Ever since falling in love with Milan Kundera in secondary school, I’ve been obsessed with love triangles.
Katie Roiphe
Difficult Women; Transit; Forest Dark
The first book I loved this year was the NYRB reissue of David Plante’s Difficult Women, an incredible first-hand account of his encounters with three prickly and charismatic women: Jean Rhys, Germaine Greer and Sonia Orwell. Another book that stands out is Rachel Cusk’s Transit (Vintage), part of her masterful trilogy about a woman in a moment of radical transition (a genre I generally love, which also includes Nicole Krauss’s excellent Forest Dark (Bloomsbury).
Marina Warner
A Chill in the Air; The Golden Legend; Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms
Iris Origo’s A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary 1939-1940 (Pushkin Press) unfolds from week to week the horrible confusion, fear and misery as Mussolini shouted and swaggered; her clear-eyed account reads with truly alarming timeliness. Nadeem Aslam interweaves rich, poetic symbols with stark political realities in The Golden Legend (Faber) and manages to keep up hope in the strength of love and imagination. The art of the Brazilian-born Lygia Pape was a revelation to me: potent, playful and sometimes sublime works (Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms, ed. Iria Candela et al, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
Joe Dunthorne
The Evenings; Conversations With Friends
I loved The Evenings (Pushkin Press) by Gerard Reve, surely the funniest novel ever written about boredom. It’s a classic of Dutch literature – first published in 1947 – but has only just found its way into English. The translation by Sam Garrett is perfect. I also adored Conversations With Friends (Faber) by Sally Rooney; a witty, nuanced and perfectly observed novel of modern love and friendship.
John Gray
Six Minutes in May; My House of Sky
Using new evidence with a novelist’s feeling for personality and atmosphere, Nicholas Shakespeare’s Six Minutes in May: How Churchill Unexpectedly Became Prime Minister (Harvill Secker) tells how a military disaster, parliamentary intrigues, a hidden love affair and a six-minute meeting enabled Winston Churchill to come to power. Reading this unputdownable story, I was reminded how the fate of the world can turn on the fall of a leaf. I’ve been engrossed by My House of Sky: the Life of JA Baker (Little Toller Books) by Hetty Saunders. This definitive biography of the author of The Peregrine, Baker’s lyrical account of his 10-year struggle to see the world through the eyes of the falcon, is a pioneering study of a solitary British visionary who recorded his attempt to break open the doors of perception in prose of astonishing power and originality.
Rupert Thomson
First Love; Madame Zero; Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Gwendoline Riley is a writer who cuts right to the heart of things, and her fifth novel, First Love (Granta), is predictably raw, fierce and true. If you like your fiction reassuring, look elsewhere. Sarah Hall is another voice I love. Her new book of short stories, Madame Zero (Faber), is a showcase for her clean, vivid style and her surreal, often feral imagination. Ocean Vuong’s collection of poems, Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Jonathan Cape), startled me with its urgency and its relevance. An eerily sure-footed debut.