Elizabeth Strout writes novels the old-fashioned way: by hand. “I have to earn my way physically through a sentence — I like to see what I’ve done and make a mess and keep going until I can’t read it anymore,” says the author of “Olive Kitteredge,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories set in her native Maine. Strout’s latest, “The Burgess Boys”—about two brothers haunted by a freak childhood accident — just came out in paperback. As an editor of other people’s short stories, Strout says she looks for “an experience of seamlessness, of being invited into a world that takes me away from my own and is believable and real.”
Here’s what’s in this writer’s library.
The Odds: A Love Story
by Stewart O’Nan
I love this writer’s work, and this is his latest. It’s about a long-married couple betting everything during a weekend of gambling at Niagara Falls. O’Nan keeps you right on the edge of your seat. You are right there, cheering for these two, even when they are not necessarily able to cheer for each other.
Thirty Girls
by Susan Minot
A gorgeously written novel that juxtaposes two very different women, one a journalist who has suffered an emotional displacement of sorts, and the other a 16-year-old girl, Esther, who has suffered unspeakably at the hands of rebels in Uganda. Minot manages to make these two narratives nuanced and connected in their ability to inspire our compassion.
Stop Here
by Beverly Gologorsky
A gem of a book, involving a very human cast of characters. Many of them work at Murray’s Diner, a character in its own right, on Long Island. It is a moving portrayal of working-class America, forcing us to take a good look at the people who fight our wars and serve our coffee.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank
by Nathan Englander
A short-story writer, Englander brings his mastery to these tales of human experience, which are concerned in large part with fraught relationships with Jewish orthodoxy. The title story is one of the finest I can think of — a whopper of an ending, and a beautifully crafted tale.