NICOLE COOLEY: I just finished Liza Mundy's Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction is Changing Men, Women and the World--a riveting account of new technologies of reproduction and pregnancy. (I love reading outside the field of literary studies and it always seems to inform my writing.) Also this summer I have been working through Maurice Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster, since I have spent the past year writing a book of poems about Hurricane Katrina. And I've been enjoying some new books of poetry: Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (I'm thinking we need a book like this for Queens!), Tracy K. Smith's Duende, and a book from Alice James Books called Take What You Want by Henrietta Goodman, a poet I discovered on Poetry Daily.
RIGOBERTO GONZALEZ: I am currently reading two very controversial books for a lecture I'm preparing on writing about sensitive subject matter. The two books in question: White Dog by Romain Gary, an account of an encounter with a German shepherd that was trained to attack black people, and The Child by Sarah Schulman, a fictionalized account of the 1997 New Jersey case in which a 15-year-old boy sexually assaulted and murdered an 11-year-old boy. In poetry: Cathy Park Hong's Dance Dance Revolution and Aracelis Girmay's Teeth. For the long list of Chicano/Latino titles, check my website.
KIMIKO HAHN: I just finished reading Harold Schechter's galleys for his latest true crime book, The Devil’s Gentlemen: Privilege, Poison and the Trial that Ushered in the 20th Century (forthcoming October from Random House). It's an elegant and lurid read. Also, I have read about five of Ian McEwan's incredibly beautiful and twisted books. I began with a particularly disturbing one: The Cement Garden. Poetry? Justin Chin's Gutted and Dear Regime by a former Queens College student, Roger Sedarat.
RICHARD SCHOTTER: I just finished reading English playwright (of The History Boys fame) Alan Bennett's memoir/diary Untold Stories. Partly, an affecting, beautifully understated account of his mother's descent into depression, which captures both the horror of the event and the world of northern England in the fifties. I'm now beginning a new novel, How to Talk to a Widower, by a relatively young American novelist named Jonathan Tropper, whose previous novels, Everything Changes and The Book of Joe, I really enjoyed. He has a wonderfully open, deceptively easy, conversational style. And there's something about his voice and subject matter that moves me and makes me laugh as well.
JOHN WEIR: Last month I went to Germany to read from my first novel in its German translation at an international conference on AIDS. That was weird and overwhelming, given that I know maybe six words of German. As a result of that trip, I've been reading two books, one related to AIDS, and one to Germany: Marcia Angell's The Truth About the Drug Companies, and Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum. Grass' novel is long and plotless (unless "history" counts as plot). As for poetry, I recently bought A. R. Ammons' Collected Poems, mostly because I liked something he said in an interview: "I write to be included in a world I feel rejected by."
