PR: Zans Brady Krohn
Zans Brady Krohn (@deathstarboy) is a writer from California. Her short stories have been published in The Paris Review, Muumuu House, Heavy Traffic, Forever Mag, and elsewhere. She edits the fiction column at Byline. She is working on her first novel and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The last thing you finished reading
Concrete by Bernhard. Read it in like a day. Loved it.
The last thing you abandoned reading
I can’t really remember the last thing I abandoned… Proust is a lifelong stop and start. I recently paused Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, same with The Sight of Death by T. J. Clark. I’m going to finish it but I got frustrated that I can’t see the Poussin paintings myself.
Next on your list
I usually have a big ambitious stack to pull from and then I find something else and all bets are off. I’m going to the library later to get Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte, My Ántonia and A Lost Lady by Willa Cather so it will probably be one of those. Darconville's Cat by Alexander Theroux is on the list, courtesy of Jeff Joyal, who generously lent me his copy…
The books we brought to Virginia Something on your list but you never begin
Ugh… it’s a bit embarrassing. The Trial and The Castle. I have so much resistance to these for whatever reason. Maybe I just want to save them.
Something in which you have no interest
Stoner by John Williams.
Something you reread
Love letters, old diary entries, nasty emails or text messages, receipts I find at the bottom of my purse…
Something you never forget
The epigraph to M.F.K. Fisher’s Consider the Oyster… Jonathan Swift: “He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.”
And the closing lines from Nathan Dragon’s “I Am a Little World”:
“You ever feel like someone who you’ve seen around a lot but never met is a good friend?—or even someone you fucking hate, like they’ve been messing with you?
I am that one.”
Conditions in which you read best
I read best when I was a child. Some of my most vivid reading experiences: when I was a child… now, when I’m supposed to be doing something else… when someone is reading to me. When someone is asleep beside me.
Conditions in which you read most often
Probably right now, the condition of being in Virginia lol. In the morning, in bed with coffee, or on the exercise bike when I had one. When I’m unhappy, or very happy.
Conditions in which you cannot read
When I sense someone watching me
A favourite author
Jean-Philippe Toussaint. The Bathroom and Camera are my favorites of his.
A favourite genre, form, theme
Other than Letters to Wendy’s I don’t really care for the epistolary form. I’m open to suggestions though. I like weird family stuff, French memoirists, stuff about power dynamics, psychoanalysis, apartments…
A favourite title
I like V. by Thomas Pynchon, though that’s not an exciting answer, and I haven’t read any Pynchon, including V. I like fairytale type titles too: The Princess with the Golden Hair by Edmund Wilson, which is fantastic. The Baron in the Trees by Calvino. An Armful of Warm Girl. Henry Green’s gerunds: Party Going, Concluding, Loving, Doting, Nothing... Oh, also, I’m Not Stiller by Max Frisch. Never read it, always wanted to, should be an answer to #4, but it gets stuck in my head.
A favourite book cover
It’s not really a favorite per se, but the cover of Jeff Eugenides’ Middlesex is branded into my mind. My parents had a copy, and I was immediately attracted to the cigarettes and smoke and that the title had the word ‘sex’ in it. I also like this copy of Alain-Fournier’s The Lost Estate that I just finished, the photo is attributed to Jeni Thompson but I can’t find anything about it.
A favourite recent read
The Mystery Guest by Grégoire Bouillier. Breakfast at Tiffany’s!!!
A favourite nostalgia read
I think The Mystery Guest will become my nostalgia read.
A favourite greatest of all time, personal canon read
An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel.
Do you annotate
Rarely. Usually just Proust. One line (in pencil) down the side of a passage. And some lols, stars, exclamation points.
Do your books tend toward any condition
The spines are usually cracked and ruined—I love floppy slutty paperbacks that splay open, some books are so tightly bound and the margins are too small and you have to force them open to read one-handed on your side in bed, etc. They’re usually dog-eared (on the top to mark my place, on the bottom if there’s something notable on the page).
Do you have any books that are prized possessions
Last year my bf Charlie hunted down and gifted me The Complete Uncollected Short Stories of J. D. Salinger, Vol. 1 & 2, unauthorized bootleg editions of short stories that he published between 1940 and 1965. They were marketed and sold in stores in 70s by a pseudonymous publisher, I think about 25 000 copies were circulating at some point, and when Salinger found out, he lost his shit and took every measure he could to suppress them. Except mine survived :) and the editions are very pretty. The Salinger biography by Shane Salerno and David Shields has some good tidbits about the whole thing, I very much recommend that bio.
A text that surprised you
Most books I like surprise me in some way. Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook Trilogy. My Search for Warren Harding by Robert Plunket was surprisingly delightful. I also just finished Christine Angot’s Incest and was very surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I don’t really know why. I’m not sure I’d recommend it to anybody. It’s very stream of consciousy, Ernaux-esque but grittier… ranty… manic… French…
A text that disappointed you
Franny and Zooey. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. The premise really hooked me: a young couple, both virgins, are honeymooning in a hotel on the Dorset coast. The book studies the consummation as it unfolds over the course of their wedding night. It’s beautifully written, but too many thick flashback sections, and by the end, it feels like McEwan ran out of steam and rushed it. Though I guess that mirrors another “resolution” lol
A text that altered you somehow
I had a very powerful response to The Princess of Clèves by Madame de La Fayette. It’s a work of historical fiction about Henri II’s court. It’s a gem, I don’t think she wrote anything else of this caliber. I read it over Christmas break in Australia a few years ago, and I was pretty adjusted to the jet lag by then but so obsessed with the book, I’d wake up very early to keep reading before family breakfast and activities… I was totally rapt. When I finished it, I had a very visceral physical reaction: I was trembling, sweating, I felt like I was floating up from our Airbnb sofa. The book ended up changing my life in several ways, and led me to Proust, which has probably rearranged me more than anything else.
Cabourg, which Proust named "Balbec" in his novel. The narrator meets Elstir in these sand dunes and they run into the little band of girls Open up a text and copy a line at random
“Many of the correspondents began by claiming that ‘they never slept a wink’ and then went on to supply enough information to assure me they were getting at least six hours of sleep.”From The Sleep Instinct by Ray Meddis
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