Bookmarked Books

The Bookmarked series focuses on a famous work of literature that left a powerful impression on an author (hence the name, Bookmarked—a book that left its mark). Each entry in the series will be a no-holds-barred personal narrative detailing how a particular novel influenced an author on their journey to becoming a writer, as well as the myriad directions where that journey has taken them. In the first book in the series, critically acclaimed author and series editor Kirby Gann takes on John Knowles' classic about the tragic friendship between two boys at a boarding school. Kirby Gann is the author of the novels Ghosting , Our Napoleon in Rags and The Barbarian Parade . He is the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship and two Professional Assistance Awards from the Kentucky Arts Council. Gann is managing editor at Sarabande Books, and teaches in the brief-residency MFA in writing program at Spalding University.

Slaughterhouse-Five is a seminal novel of contemporary literature, a rumination on war, space, time and the meaning of life and death. In Kurt Vonnegut’s existential classic, we meet Billy Pilgrim, a man who has become unmoored in time after being abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a non-linear universe where time has no meaning, we revisit key moments in Pilgrim’s life, in particular his harrowing experience as an American prisoner of war during the firebombing of Dresden in World War II. In this first title in the Bookmarked series, author Curtis Smith examines the influence of Slaughterhouse-Five on his life, writing and relationship with his young son. Of the book, Smith writes, “The best books are invitations. They are time machines. They challenge us to think, to reconsider. Behold Vonnegut’s time machine, a narrative of a hundred different frames, a splintered perspective that lifts his whirligig contraption from the ground. He fuels his machine with man’s weightiest elements—time, war, death—and then mixes an infusion of lightness, the spark of wit and irony. His machine rattles, taking flight with a shambling grace.” The Bookmarked series focuses on a famous work of literature that left a powerful impression on an author (hence the name, Bookmarked—a book that left its mark). Each book in the series is a no-holds barred personal narrative detailing how a particular novel influenced an author on their journey to becoming a writer, as well as the myriad directions in which that journey has taken them.

A collection of four novellas, Different Seasons includes some of Stephen King's most enduring and well-known works, including "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption," which was made into the film The Shawshank Redemption , and "The Body," which was made into the movie Stand by Me . For this entry in the Bookmarked series, Aaron Burch, editor of the literary journal Hobart , will focus on the influence of "The Body" on his life and work. Aaron Burch 's fiction has appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including The &NOW Awards , The Best Innovative Writing , Another Chicago magazine, New York Tyrant , Los Angeles Review , and Barrelhouse . His chapbook, How to Take Yourself Apart, How to Make Yourself Anew , was published by PANK as the winner of their inaugural chapbook contest. He is the founding and current editor of the literary journal Hobart .

“There was a book. Oh man was there a book . It is still to this day a book I mention it to any book lover if asked for a recommendation. The best books stick with you, often reminding you of the power, and potential, of storytelling, and House of Leaves is one of those books.”—Michael Seidlinger on Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves . In this volume in Ig Publishing's Bookmarked series, where an author critically engages with a book that influenced their life and writing, author Michael Seidlinger shows how the creativity and language of Danielewski's modern classic of experimental contemporary literature was a template for his own journey to becoming a writer.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be the greatest American novel ever written, its exploration of decadence, idealism, social upheaval, and excess having been described as a cautionary tale regarding the American Dream. In this entry in Ig's acclaimed Bookmarked series, author Jaime Clarke examines how this seminal novel influenced his writing and life.

Set in a small, dusty Texas town, The Last Picture Show is one of Larry McMurtry's most memorable novels, and the basis for the enormously popular movie of the same name. In this volume in Ig's acclaimed Bookmarked series, award-winning author Steve Yarbrough shares with us the importance of this seminal novel on his life and work. Steve Yarbrough is the author of nine novels, including The Realm of Last Chances (2013) and Safe from the Neighbors (2010), both published by Knopf. His 2006 novel, The End of California , (Knopf) was a finalist for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for fiction. His 2004 novel, Prisoners of War , was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and his 1999 novel, The Oxygen Man , won the California Book Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and the Mississippi Authors Award. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories , Best American Mystery Stories , and the Pushcart Prize Anthology . In 2010, he won the Richard Wright Award.

George Saunders’ Pastoralia is an exaggerated dystopia of late capitalist America, merging the spirit of James Thurber with the world of the Simpsons. In his entry in Ig’s acclaimed Bookmarked series, award-winning author Charles Holdefer addresses how Saunders captures the pain and absurdity of the American service sector, and does justice to the dignity of the people who struggle there. Charles Holdefer has published four novels with the Permanent Press. His short fiction has appeared in many magazines, including the New England Review , Chicago Quarterly Review , North American Review , Los Angeles Review , Slice , and Yellow Silk . His story The Raptor won a Pushcart Prize in 2016. Holdefer grew up in Iowa and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Sorbonne. He currently teaches at the University of Poitiers, France.

A haunting meditation on love, loss, companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark, Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is one of the most important and influential short story collections in contemporary literature. In his entry in the esteemed Bookmarked series, acclaimed author Brian Evenson offers his personal and literary take on this classic Carver collection. Brian Evenson is the author of several books of fiction, most recently the story collection A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press, 2016) and the novella The Warren (Tor.com, 2016). His 2012 books Windeye and Immobility were both finalists for a Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Critical Studies Program at CalArts.

Stoner is a 1965 novel by the American writer John Williams. It tells the story of William Stoner, who attends the state university to study agronomy, but instead falls in love with English literature and becomes an academic. The novel narrates the many disappointments and struggles in Stoner's academic and personal life, including his estrangement from his wife and daughter, set against the backdrop of the first half of the twentieth century. In his entry in the Bookmarked series, author Steve Almond writes about why Stoner has endured, and the manner in which it speaks to the impoverishment of the inner life in America. Almond will also use the book as a launching pad for an investigation of America’s soul, in the process, writing about his own struggles as a student of writing, as a father and husband, and as a man grappling with his own mortality.

The New York Times called Malcolm Lowry's 1947 novel Under the Volcano "One of the towering novels of this century," and the Modern Library ranked the book number eleven on its list of the one hundred Best English-language novels of the twentieth century. In his Bookmarked entry, critically celebrated author David Ryan shows how this modernist masterpiece has affected his life and creative work.

“Birkerts reads Nabokov even as he allows Nabokov to read him. This is reading as high art, exhilarating and wise.”— CHRISTOPHER BENFEY, author, Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay “Much more than an exercise in literary criticism, this short book increasingly reads as a profound, sensitive, insightful meditation on family, history, time, language, the nature of artistic inspiration, and, in the end, even the meaning of life.”— OLGA GRUSHIN , author, The Dream Life of Sukhanov and Forty Rooms “Like Nabokov’s, Birkerts’ book is both a nuanced excursion into the nature of memory and a reminder that reading and writing are acts of noticing. This is a supremely alert book about a supremely alert book.” — JOAN WICKERSHAM , author, The Suicide Index Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is one of the most critically acclaimed memoirs of the twentieth century. In this classic account of his life, Nabokov writes about his idyllic Russian childhood in an aristocratic family, the Bolshevik revolution that led to his exile from Russia, and the path that would eventually lead him to live in America. In the latest volume in Ig’s Bookmarked series, celebrated author and critic Sven Birkerts writes about how Speak, Memory not only intersects with various central life-concerns (exile, serendipity and coincidence, childhood, literary redemption), but is also vital to understanding the workings of memory in literature.

“Lucid, candid reflections on Black identity.”— KIRKUS Set mainly in Greenwich Village and Harlem, James Baldwin’s 1962 novel, Another Country , is a groundbreaking work of sexual, racial and artistic passions that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality. In her volume in Ig’s acclaimed Bookmarked series, award winning author and essayist Kim McLarin shares her appreciation of this seminal novel, demonstrating how its myriad themes— including relations between men and women (gay and straight, Black and white), the meaning of creativity, and the ecstasy and pain of love—mirror many of her own life experiences. In this critical and personal examination, we come to better understand a pioneering novel and writer, as well as the role race, class and gender have played in Kim’s life, and by extension, contemporary American society.

“In taking on Capote’s masterwork, Justin St. Germain has written nothing less than an essential reckoning with the entire American enterprise of nonfiction. His book changed forever how I see not only In Cold Blood , but also true crime and the limits of literary journalism. I learned so much. This should be required reading for both writers and readers of crime.”— Alex Marzano-Lesnevich , author, The Fact Of A Body: A Murder And A Memoir "Compelling literary analysis featuring a unique personal perspective on the material."— Kirkus Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is one of the best-selling American books of all time, and is credited with starting the popular literary true crime genre. In the latest volume in Ig’s acclaimed Bookmarked series, award-wining author Justin St. Germain writes about a trip he took to Holcomb, Kansas, the site of the Clutter murders In Cold Blood claims to be about. Within the story of the trip, St. Germain talks about his obsession with Capote’s classic, and its influence on the book he was writing at the time about his mother’s murder, which became his award-winning memoir, Son of A Gun .

“This astonishing new book, by the brilliant Robin Black is an intimate meditation on reading and writing, aftermath and possibility, the tension between the never-stable, endlessly interpretable depths of a book and the fragility of life, the finality of death. I emerged from this breathtaking work with a transformed understanding of both Woolf’s masterpiece and the stream of consciousness in which we swim, “together and alone.”—Karen Russell “Reading Robin Black’s astute and enlightening meditation on Mrs. Dalloway is like eavesdropping on a mesmerizing literary conversation, but one in which the participants are not two readers but a reader and a masterpiece. Black threads the very moving story of her own evolution as a writer through the exquisite fabric of Woolf’s great novel, and the result will fascinate everyone who cares about the craft of fiction.”—Ann Packer “I loved reading Robin Black’s take on Mrs. Dalloway . She generously shares details of her own life that offer an example of how a great book stays with a person, and goes deep into the intricacies of important craft aspects of the text, illuminating its brilliance. It’s a privilege to read alongside her.”—Alice Elliot Dark “Through Black’s gorgeous blend of personal narrative and incisive close reading, Virginia Woolf’s novel becomes again fresh and contemporary, while at the same time deeper in its mysteries. I finished this Bookmarked knowing more about myself as a woman, reader, and writer.” —Pamela Erens “At fifty-nine, I am now the age Virginia Woolf was when she took that final, heavy-pocketed walk into The River Ouse. I am the age at which she killed herself, and I am not going to kill myself; but I was by no means always sure of that.” Considered Virginia Woolf's greatest novel, Mrs. Dalloway tells the story of a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a high society woman in post World War I England. As she is preoccupied with the last-minute details of dinner party, Clarissa is flooded with remembrances of the past, in the process reexamining the choices she has made, as well as looking toward old age. Written in a stream of consciousness style, Mrs. Dalloway is one of the most important novels in literature. In this deeply personal volume, Robin Black writes about Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway , a book she returned to again and again when she began writing at nearly forty and found herself gaining a sense of emotional stability for the first time in her life. For two decades, Mrs. Dalloway has been Black’s partner in a crucial, ongoing conversation about writing and about the emotional life. Now, Black takes a deep dive into both the craft of the book, what a writer might learn from its mechanics, and also into the humanity to be found on every page.

A Southern Booksellers Association Recommendation “In this trenchant memoir of reading and writing, Pamela Erens returns over a lifetime to George Eliot's Middlemarch. The calm, understanding, and generosity that she finds in Eliot's masterpiece—albeit differently, at different moments in her own life—inflects Erens’s own account of becoming, and being, a mother and a writer. This short book is filled with wisdom." — Claire Messud, author of Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write and The Woman Upstairs “Erens makes an engaging and convincing case for the value of reading Middlemarch today, when we are still struggling to answer the questions it raises—about marriage, about community, about society, and especially about how to balance our individual needs and desires against the claims of sympathy and conscience.”—Rohan Maitzen, author, Widening the Skirts of Light: Essays on George Eliot and Middlemarch for Book Clubs “Thoughtful, frank, and always artful, Middlemarch and the Imperfect Life is an involving and deeply satisfying account of the reading and writing life.”—Rebecca Mead, author, My Life in Middlemarch and Home/Land A masterly evocation of life in a provincial English community, Middlemarch is considered perhaps the greatest novel of the Victorian era, praised by writers from Emily Dickinson to Virginia Woolf. In the latest volume in Ig's acclaimed Bookmarked series, critically lauded author Pamela Erens talks about how Middlemarch "rescued” her, first as a distressed college student, and then during the tragic events of the global pandemic.

A poet who crafted the greatest character in literary history with his engaging anti-hero of Satan, John Milton connected personal experience with the breadth of cosmic epic. His Paradise Lost is a touchstone of English literature. In the latest entry in Ig's celebrated Bookmarked series, author Ed Simon considers Paradise Lost within the scope of his own alcoholism and recovery, the collapse of higher education, the imbecility of the canon wars, the piquant joys of labyrinthine sentences, and the exquisite attractions of Lucifer. Milton is easy to respect and easier to fear, but with the guidance of Simon, Milton becomes easiest of all to love. Paradise Lost may have generated thousands of works of criticism over the centuries, but none of them are like this.

Celebrated by writers including Jonathan Franzen, who said that “[t]his crazy, gorgeous family novel is one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century," The Man Who Loved Children is a 1940 novel by Australian writer Christina Stead. The harrowing portrait of a dysfunctional family, the novel focuses on the relationship between the father, Sam, a tyrannical crank far removed from the civilized man he thinks himself to be, his bitter wife, Henny, and their six children, particularly eldest daughter, Louie. Considering a contemporary classic, The Man Who Loved Children was named one of the the 100 greatest novels of all time by Time m agazine. In her entry in Ig's acclaimed Bookmarked series, author Lucy Ferriss juxtaposes the egoism and brutality of Sam with the behavior of her own father, using his dairies to give the reader an intimate and devastating portrait of their father-daughter relationship. Ferriss also shares how The Man Who Loved Children influenced her own creativity and development as a writer, as well as taking on male critics of the novel-including Franzen-to get to the true feminist heart of what Time called "the greatest picture of the lousiest family of all time."

What is it about Elena Ferrante's writing, especially her masterwork Neapolitan Novels, that resonates so deeply with millions of readers, making this Italian author who writes under a pseudonym with absolutely no "platform" an international sensation? Brilliantly addressing issues such as class struggle, female friendship, women's autonomy, and literary creation itself, Ferrante's hyperrealist, intense storytelling is a saga of a highly specific place and history, yet somehow also transcends them, resonating on profoundly personal levels with readers of every background. Gina Frangello grew up in poverty in inner-city Chicago two decades after Ferrante's most famous characters, Lenu and Lila grew up in Naples. Despite these geographic and cultural differences, Frangello felt that Ferrante was "writing about my youth, my life, my relationships, my struggles." In the latest volume in the Bookmarked series, Gina Frangello contemplates Ferrante's Neapolitan novels through the lens of memoir, literary criticism, and issues of authorial identity and gender. Should who Ferrante "is" matter? And more importantly, what is it about Lenu and Lila's story that taps into such universal truths that makes readers feel that Ferrante is writing specifically to them?