Interview: Three Books That Make Tess Gunty Angry – The New York Times

An incomplete list: Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, Maggie Nelson, Yuri Herrera, Zadie Smith, Diane Williams, Valeria Luiselli, Olga Tokarczuk, Rachel Kushner, Elena Ferrante, Ben Lerner, Carmen Maria Machado, Joy Williams, Hanif Abdurraqib, Nuar Alsadir, Robin Coste Lewis, Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Sharon Olds, Morgan Parker, Tommy Pico, Terrance Hayes, Ada Limn, Tracy K. Smith, Annie Baker, Amy Herzog, Paula Vogel, Svetlana Alexievich, Rachel Aviv, Ed Yong, Matthew Desmond, Alexandra Kleeman, Susan Choi, Chris Ware, Tommy Orange, Javier Zamora, Jenny Offill, Annie Ernaux, Anne Enright, Lydia Davis, Raven Leilani, Mark Z. Danielewski, Jennifer Egan, George Saunders. I cant believe I get to share a time period with all of these people.

Whats the last book you read that made you cry?

Calling a Wolf a Wolf, by Kaveh Akbar, specifically the penultimate poem: I Wont Lie This Plague of Gratitude. Akbar alchemizes pain into beauty line after line, but it was an unexpected evocation of hope that made me cry. In this poem, the speaker is thunderstruck by a newfound plague of gratitude. The speaker says: Not long ago I was hard to even/hug ... I had to learn to love people one at a time/singing hey diddle diddle will you suffer me/a little ... now I am cheery/and Germanic like a drawer full/of strudel. Akbars describing a small psychological sanctuary a relief, permanent or fleeting, from everything that has haunted the speaker until now. The poem plunged me into that first miraculous flash of hope you enjoy after a long storm of bad brain chemistry. The moment you remember that it can be enjoyable to simply exist.

The last book that made you furious?

So many come to mind. I guess Im often furious? Im currently reading three impeccably researched works of nonfiction that are informing previously amorphous concerns. Poverty, by America, by Matthew Desmond, investigates structurally engineered poverty. One of the many memorable facts that this book delineates is that America spends over twice as much on tax benefits for the upper class as it does on national defense. Empire of Pain, by Patrick Radden Keefe, makes me enraged about the Sackler family, of course, but more generally about how vulnerable American health care and pharmaceutical systems are to bad actors worse, poorly regulated capitalism incentivizes bad actors to do harm. The Alignment Problem, by Brian Christian, makes me furious about the myopic tech boys currently pursuing immortality and godlike dominance by attempting to summon the existential threat of artificial general intelligence into the world. They are facilitated by an absence of legal restrictions and the primeval excuse that if We dont do it first, They will.

What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

My family is always shocked by how many books on neuroscience and quantum physics Ive amassed. They like to remind me that I am bad at science. Probably most surprising is that Im still under the delusion that I will someday read all 1,500 pages of The Matter With Things, by Iain McGilchrist a blend of neuroscience, metaphysics and epistemology about the hemispheres of the brain and the nature of consciousness. I think you start levitating as soon as you finish it.

Whats the best book youve ever received as a gift?

When I graduated college, my good friend Alex gave me a beautiful, professionally bound copy of the novella I wrote for my thesis. He even got a mutual friend to blurb it. The novella itself is a catastrophe a cluttered story about four characters from different centuries saddled with shared omniscient narration who meet in a Purgatory that resembles postindustrial Indiana. Eventually, it collapses into metafictional chaos. Flawed as the project is, I had transferred my 21-year-old spirit into its pages, and Alex knew that if I could hold a leatherbound copy of this effort in my hands, if I could see my name engraved in gold on the spine, some psychological chasm between the life I had and the life I wanted would begin to close. For years, as I submitted my fiction and accumulated rejections, losing faith that I would ever publish, I would catch a glimpse of this book on my shelf, and its presence would nourish me. It remains one of the most cherished gifts Ive ever received.

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Interview: Three Books That Make Tess Gunty Angry - The New York Times