Extra Libris

“Full Body Burden not only took ten years of research and writing,” reveals author Kristen Iversen, “but it proved to be a turning point in my life.”

“I was able to look back on my life, particularly my adolescent years, and put many things in perspective. My family has been remarkably supportive of the book, and we grew closer as we talked about things in the past that we had never really talked about before.

The book has also had a big impact on the lives of people who live near Rocky Flats or other nuclear facilities in the United States and beyond – people whose stories and experiences have rarely been told.”

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Eliot Lamb, the grad-school narrator of Ben Masters’ debut novel Noughties, reads constantly. Here, Ben Masters shares Eliot’s reading list.

Eliot’s own reading plays a key part in the novel, and I deliberately planted references to a range of coming-of-age novels and a couple of other books that offer either analogies or ironic commentaries to his own experiences.

They aren’t particularly surprising examples as they are meant to reflect what he has been reading at university, but they are still novels that I am very fond of myself.

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“The thing that particularly intrigued me about Eliot’s voice was its awkward relationship to his studies,” says Ben Masters of the narrator of Noughties.

He arrives at Oxford fairly rough around the edges and quickly finds that his head is being filled with a chaos of knowledge, mostly literary and philosophical, mostly perplexing, and he simply doesn’t know what to do with it. That’s where the voice comes from – a painful mixture of the colloquial and the literary.

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Having my novel appear in the U.S. was a real thrill for someone brought up on U.S. television, music, and books.

Writing the novel was a quick but intense process. This seemed necessary – not only did the narrative demand a certain amount of speed and reckless energy, but I could also feel myself as a first-time writer outgrowing it and becoming distracted by other newly forming ideas.

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Nichole Bernier – author of The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D. – shares a list of books that remind us you never really know the hearts and minds of others.

“Books that reveal that things are not what they seem have always fascinated me,” says Nichole Bernier. “Here are some of my favorites that show the hidden pains and motivations roiling beneath the surface of us all.”

Nichole Bernier includes classics like Crossing to Safety, recent bestsellers like Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, and book club favorites like A Pilot’s Wife. Check out her list and tell us about a book you think should make the list!

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Gary Krist, author of City of Scoundrels, shares a (highly opinionated) bibliography of Chicago novels, including classics like Sister Carrie and Native Son as well as some little-known gems.

“Chicago has been the inspiration for so many of the great American novels of the early twentieth century,” says Gary Krist. “Gritty realism, after all, was the prevailing aesthetic of that era, and no place lent itself better to gritty realism than the Megalopolis of the Prairie. Here are a few personal favorites that I feel best convey the essence of the city around the time at which City of Scoundrels takes place.”

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