Find out what The New York Times journalist reads …
She has worked for BuzzFeed and at McClatchy Newspapers, where she was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for coverage of the Senate’s report on the CIA’s post-9/11 torture programme. She now lives between Galway and Northern Ireland.
“I’m embarrassed it’s taken this long, but I’m finally reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. I think after any big journalistic or non-fiction project, I need to throw myself into something dense and fictional. It’s like a release valve after I’ve been so tied to fact and real life. Tartt is obviously a master storyteller, and I’ve gotten completely lost in this dark tale about five misfits at a cloistered, posh liberal arts school in New England. There are so many books that are long but don’t have to be – The Secret History is one of those rare examples where the sheer breadth is part of the cleverness. I’m so disoriented as a reader, lost in characters’ rambling monologues or random vignettes, confused over who I should trust and who I should hate. There’s this nagging feeling that something isn’t as it seems. I’m reading it slowly, savouring every page. It’s a master work.
“I’ve been counting the days to the release of Karen Russell’s The Antidote, a Dust Bowl-set epic that plays with Steinbeckian settings, memory, and … magic? Sounds amazing, sign me up. I spent a lot of time out west when I lived in the US, and I’m obsessed with the energy of the place: how complicated it is, its ties to American lore and identity, its uneasy, violent place in the country’s history. Russell’s central plot involves a young woman who blows in to a fictional, poverty-stricken Nebraska town. Her purpose? She’s a supernatural repository for people’s memories and secrets in a besieged community facing internal division and external, extinctive forces like climate crisis. Some themes are timeless.
“I’m also antsy for a copy of Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter. Years after I read it, I’m still haunted by Graham Jones’ 2020 novel, The Only Good Indians, set around a Blackfeet reservation out west. To call his work supernatural horror is a disservice to Graham Jones’ genius – as he shows us, real life in these violent, unreconciled places can be as gruesome and unsparing as fiction.”
The Next One Is For You by Ali Watkins is published by Icon Books.
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