Welcome to the Book Marks Questionnaire, where we ask authors questions about the books that have shaped them.
This week, we spoke to the author of Savage Tongues, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi.
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Book Marks: First book you remember loving?
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
BM: Favorite re-read?
AVdVO: James Baldwin, Another Country.
BM: What book do you think your book is most in conversation with?
AVdVO: Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook and Elena Ferrante, Days of Abandonment.
BM: A book that blew your mind?
AVdVO: Toni Morrison, Sula.
BM: Last book you read?
AVdVO: Sally Rooney, Conversations With Friends.
BM: A book that made you cry?
AVdVO: Marguerite Duras, The Lover.
BM: What book from the past year would you like to give a shout-out to?
AVdVO: Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning.
BM: A book that actually made you laugh out loud?
AVdVO: Samuel Beckett, Molloy.
BM: What’s one book you wish you had read during your teenage years?
AVdVO: Laura Van den Berg, I Hold A Wolf By The Ears.
BM: Favorite book to give as a gift?
AVdVO: Claudia Rankine, Citizen.
BM: Classic book you hate?
AVdVO: Paradise Lost.
BM: Classic book on your To Be Read pile?
AVdVO: Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.
BM: What’s a book with a really great sex scene?
AVdVO: Garth Greenwell, Cleanness.
BM: Favorite book no one has heard of?
AVdVO: The Waitress Was New by Dominique Fabre, Translated by Jordan Stump.
BM: Favorite book of the 21st century?
AVdVO: Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy.
BM: Favorite book you were assigned in high school?
AVdVO: Toni Morrison, Beloved.
BM: Book(s) you’re reading right now?
AVdVO: Rachel Cusk, Second Place. Don Delillo, Underworld. Roberto Bolaño, 2666.
BM: Favorite children’s book?
AVdVO: Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio.
BM: Book you wish would be adapted for a film/tv show?
AVdVO: Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives.
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Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of the novels Savage Tongues, Call Me Zebra and Fra Keeler and is the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. She is the winner of a 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award, a John Gardner Award, a 2015 Whiting Award, a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, and the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, as well as residency fellowships from MacDowell and Ledig House. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, Guernica, Granta, BOMB, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago and is the founder of Literatures of Annihilation, Exile and Resistance, a lecture series on the global Middle East that focuses on literature shaped by colonialism, military domination and state-sanctioned violence.
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Savage Tongues is out tomorrow from Mariner Books
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