Mark Seliger / Illustration by Yousra Attia
Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you’re here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.
Marlon James’s fifth novel, Moon Witch, Spider King (Riverhead), out this week, is the second in his fantasy Dark Star trilogy after the NYT-bestselling National Book Award finalist Black Leopard, Red Wolf, film rights to which were acquired by Warner Bros. and Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society. James, whose novel A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Man Booker Prize, is also writing and producing detective series Get Millie Black (his mother rose from police officer to detective) for HBO. Not bad for someone whose first novel was rejected 78 times.
The Jamaica-born, New York-based author was first inspired to write after reading Laura Ingalls Wilder as a kid; teaches creative writing at Macalester College; was on Time’s 100 Most Influential People list (his entry was written by Salman Rushdie); has worked as a copywriter at an ad agency, graphic designer for a Kingston record label and art director for musicians (as a boss he instituted Talk Like a Pirate Day); and does a podcast with his editor, “Marlon & Jake Read Dead People.”
Likes: Prince (he was caught trying to break into Paisley Park); cooking; Grace Jones; Korean zombie movies, comics, Roman poet Lucan, Muji pens. Dislikes: Silence. Here, a few of his shout-outs.
The book that:
…made me miss a train stop:
As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann. Considering that the narrator is a murderous sociopath with disturbing ideas about consent, that’s saying something.
…I recommend over and over again:
The Time Of Our Singing by Richard Powers. It’s the last novel where I rooted for every character, and the last to make me cry.
…I swear I’ll finish one day:
Middlemarch by George Elliot. Tons of people I admire consider this the greatest novel not written by a male Russian, but I can’t get past that this was assigned to me in high school for an exam I nearly failed.
…I first bought:
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding. I so hated the first pages of Middlemarch that I went to the examinations office and demanded the lit syllabus. Tom Jones was at the top of the list.
…has the best opening line:
Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist And the Murderer. “Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”
…currently sits on my nightstand:
Mordew by Alex Pheby. God is dead, and we’re literally living off his corpse. The future of fantasy starts here.
…has the greatest ending:
Sula by Toni Morrison. Morrison’s genius is in writing scenes that fill you with joy and sorrow at once, and this will give you a pre-emptive smile to counteract the tears bound to come.
…shaped my worldview:
Also, Sula. And it was one line: “Show? To who?” Sula says this in response to being asked what she had to show for this great life she claims she had. It took just one sentence for me to realize that the only person I had to answer to in this world was me.
…I read in one sitting; it was that good:
Hollywood Wives by Jackie Collins. I finished that book at six in the morning, took my 13-year-old self to the mirror and said, “You’s an adult, now.”
…has the greatest ending:
Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls. It doesn’t end, so much as stop, with a gut punch of a final line: “But he never came.”
…has the best title:
Your Mouth Is Lovely by Nancy Richler. Haven’t gotten to reading it yet, though. Also, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues by Tom Robbins, but I haven’t read that one either.
…has a sex scene that will make you blush:
The Sluts by Dennis Cooper. It also has a few sex scenes that will make you recoil in horror, or seriously consider the priesthood.
…I could only have discovered at the late lamented Gotham Book Mart:
The Obscene Bird Of Night by Jose Doñoso. The kind of book you own only because a bookseller insisted that you read it.
…that holds the recipe to a favorite dish:
The lime and coconut potato gratin in Yotam Ottolenghi’s Ottolenghi Flavor. The puttanesca is also incredible.
…I’d like turned into a Netflix show:
Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer series. No other crime writer went deeper into our troubled psyches than Macdonald, and each novel is an eight-episode miniseries waiting to happen.
…surprised me:
The Secret Lives Of Church Ladies by Deeshaw Philyaw. Because not only do I know every single church lady in that book, but I’ve been at least three of them.
…I last bought:
All That She Carried by Tiya Miles. A single object handed down through three generations of Black women. It’s Black history as an act of personal restoration.
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