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Marilyn Chin on airplane reading: I usually read several books at once. And because I am such an obsessive, geeky writer, I usually read books that would feed the muse. That is to say, I don’t read for pleasure anymore, I only read for research or read to learn from other writers or masters. Sad, but true. On my red-eye plane ride [to Yaddo, an artist colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.], I carried with me a bilingual edition of 300 Poems of the Tang Dynasty, J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories and Donald Barthelme’s Short-story collection, Sadness. I am reading Chinese poetry to practice my Classical Chinese, and these story collections because I am writing stories these days, and reading these modern classics will engage me in the esthetics of the short story. ... And curiously, I also purchased the most recent issue of Elle. Oh, I guess, after all, I am a woman, and I need to know what other women are wearing this summer!
— Marilyn Chin’s latest poetry collection is Rhapsody in Plain Yellow. Other titles include The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty and Dwarf Bamboo. She also co-edited Dissident Song: A Contemporary Asian American Anthology (with David Wong Louie). She’s the recipient of two NEA writing fellowships.
Don Lee
Don Lee on his favorite bathroom reading: I read magazines on the can. The New Yorker lets me imagine I can be smarter. WindSurfing lets me imagine I can finally crack that planing carve jibe. Men’s Health lets me imagine I can lose my love handles, acquire those elusive ripping, six-pack abs, and become a potent, enduring, irresistible sex machine. The problem with reading on the can is that, at the end of the day, all that knowledge, all that resolve, all that inspiration, tends — like everything else in this transitory, wiki-wiki world — to get flushed.
— Don Lee is the acclaimed author of Yellow: Stories, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The story “The Possible Husband” won an O. Henry Award, and the story “The Price of Eggs in China” won a Pushcart Prize. Lee is also the editor of the prestigious literary journal Ploughshares.
An Na
An Na on her all-time favorite beach reading: When I’m at the beach my attention span is close to nilch. There’s so much to look at: the sand castles, the kids jumping through the waves, eye candy coming at you on the right. Most times, I take a magazine, but if choose a book, it’ll be a collection of short stories. One of my favorites, Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America, is both witty and poignant. She can make me laugh out loud one moment and then sigh in empathy with a turn of the page. Her stories keep my attention even with all the tempting distractions a beach has to offer.
— An Na’s first and only book thus far, A Step From Heaven, won the prestigious 2002 Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in young adult literature.
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