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Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you’re here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.
Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake (Scribner), about a secret agent who infiltrates a commune in France (a yearly destination for the author), was just longlisted for the Booker Prize, her second nomination since 2018’s The Mars Room, the end of which she wrote from the inside of a giant sequoia. Her first 2 novels (Telex from Cuba, which features a call girl character named Rachel K., and The Flamethrowers) were nominated for the National Book Award in Fiction.
The Eugene, OR-born, San Francisco-raised, L.A.-based NYT-bestselling author, is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and has an MFA from Columbia, where one of her teachers was Jonathan Franzen. In her youth, she lived in a painted school bus with beatnik parents, who once left her and her brother money in a jar for food that they spent on kites. She had worked 3 jobs by age 10, including at a feminist bookstore; studied in Italy her junior year of college; taught Proust (her favorite author) at Syracuse University; tended bar in SF’s the Tenderloin; crashed during illegal race Cabo 1000 doing 130mph on her Kawasaki Ninja 600; modeled her writing room after Freud’s London office; wore jeans when she wed her philosophy prof husband at City Hall; worked at Grand Street and Bomb and wrote for artforum; framed the first letter she received from Don DeLillo; spent a weekend at Palestinian refugee camp Shuafat, which she wrote about for the NYT Magazine; curated her favorite films for Galerie Films and will do so for Criterion in September; and decided to learn French from scratch at middle age and after three years of toil can now hold a conversation for an entire meal.
Likes: Art, classic cars (her first IG post was of her 1964 Ford Galaxie 500), county fairs, Collonges-la-Rouge village in France; Chanel Rouge Coco Ultra Hydrating Lip Color in #438 (‘Suzanne”).
Good at: Skiing (started at 3 and skied alone til age 7; she was on the ski team at UC Berkeley, which she attended at 16 and wrote her thesis on US policy in Nicaragua as a political economy major).
Dos: Thrifting, cooking, 5-mile runs.
Fan of: “Wanda” (1970 16mm film), mechanics. Let her book recs below spark your TBR pile.
The book that:
…helped me through loss:
I do not read for therapeutic purposes, but if I were recommending a title to someone who wanted to think into a loss they had experienced, I’d recommend Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman, an absolutely genius, artful, brutal, absurd and even, at times, quite funny, book about his young and talented wife, Aura, who died body surfing in Mexico.
…kept me up way too late:
Three to Kill by Jean-Patrick Manchette: vicious and hilarious, Manchette was a new discovery for me about three years ago.
…made me weep uncontrollably:
I don’t know that I “wept uncontrollably” but the last volume (Dependency) of the Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen introduced an icy chill into my soul. It was hard to shake. I still recommend those three slim novels to people, but I always warn them not to read the third one at night, before bed, as it’s too dire.
…I recommend over and over again:
Morvern Callar by Alan Warner. Also Pale Fire. Perfect book. Nabokov is “built different.” Also, I’ll assert: he’s actually an American writer on some very deep level. He gets at, understands, American lust and vulgarity and highfalutin dreaming.
…shaped my worldview:
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, in which the town hobos are the “true philosophers.” But I’m not sure I have a worldview, to be honest. And if I do, it was probably shaped by childhood longings as much as, or even more than literature: pop songs, advertisements, the county fair, natural beauty, charismatic people.
…made me rethink a long-held belief:
I love Joan Didion and her bulletproof style, its sheen, but rereading “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” a while back made me rethink my long-held belief that Didion is neutral and a sensitive observer, when really, that title essay of her collection portrays mostly that Joan Didion just doesn’t understand hippies. It’s full of confirmation bias.
…I swear I’ll finish one day:
The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa.
…I read in one sitting, it was that good:
Blindness by José Saramago. More recently: The Guest by Emma Cline.
…currently sits on my nightstand:
La Captive by Christine Smallwood and Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti.
…I’d pass on to my kid:
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, which I’m reading now. My son read Never Let Me Go and really liked it.
…made me laugh out loud:
Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq has the funniest last line to its first paragraph. I laugh again just thinking of it.
…I last bought:
I just bought Elena Ferrante’s Troubling Love, never having read it.
….has the best title:
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis.
…has the best opening line:
“Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year” is how Americana, Don DeLillo’s first novel, begins.
…has the greatest ending:
Flaubert’s Sentimental Education has an incredible ending. It’s bleak, but also incredibly funny, and I’ll never forget it.
…has a sex scene that will make you blush:
The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis has many.
…features a character I love to hate:
Maybe Lolita except I don’t really hate Humbert. He’s all we have, and so, like Lo, we cling to him.
…helped me become a better writer:
Democracy and A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion.
…is a master class on dialogue:
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson.
…describes a place I’d want to visit:
Summer 80 by Marguerite Duras, written from her balcony at Les Roches Noires in Trouville, where I’d like to visit, and never have. And the world that M.F.K. Fisher writes about in Dijon, in her book, Long Ago in France.
…I brought on a momentous trip:
I read George Eliot’s Middlemarch in eastern Cuba while on a trip there with my mother and half of my experience was inside the book, the other in this new old world, where my mother had lived as a child.
…I consider literary comfort food:
Proust, because everything worth noting about the human experience, put into exquisite and wonderful clauses and subclauses, is all there.
…I would have blurbed if asked:
Ecclesiastes, for the galling force of his assertions, and not because I, too, believe that everything is meaningless (I don’t).
…sealed a friendship:
Ingrid Caven, by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, sealed the friendship with the person who became my husband.
…inspired me to donate to a cause:
Inside This Place, Not of It, a Voice of Witness book about people incarcerated in women’s prisons, inspired me to get involved with the organization Justice Now, which did human rights work in women’s prisons in California.
…makes me feel seen:
Child of God by Cormac McCarthy, whose coarse humor I find irresistible.
…features the most beautiful book jacket:
A Czechoslovakian edition I have of The Grapes of Wrath, with a drawn in pastel image on the cover of Oakies on the road.
….I could only have discovered in the rare book room at Shakespeare and Company in Paris:
I have a first edition hardcover here of Sartre’s “Saint Genet, Actor and Marty”
Bonus question: If I could live in any library or bookstore in the world, it would be:
I would live in the apartment behind Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and have, and will be going to stay there (again!) in January, when the French edition of my novel comes out. A library I could see living in, even if life there might get a little surreal: the Biblioteca Ibroamericana Octavio Paz in Guadalajara, originally a temple, but maybe [turned] into a library in 1917, with gorgeous red murals in a simple style by Siquieros, which depict farm work and city work, in rebellion.
The literary organization/charity I support:
Freedom Reads, which was founded by the brilliant poet, lawyer, and human rights and literacy advocate Reginald Dwayne Betts, and which provides books to incarcerated people all over the United States.
Riza Cruz is an editor and writer based in New York.