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 In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado.
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Book Marks: First book you remember loving?
Carmen Maria Machado: Louis Sachar’s Sideways Stories from Wayside School.
BM: Favorite re-read?
CMM: Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.
BM: A book that blew your mind?
CMM: Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine.
BM: What book from the past year would you like to give a shout-out to?
CMM: Ruman Alaam’s Leave the World Behind.
BM: A book that actually made you laugh out loud?
CMM: Evan James’ Cheer Up, Mr. Widdicombe.
BM: What’s one book you wish you had read during your teenage years?
CMM: Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.
BM: What’s a book with a really great sex scene?
CMM: Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed.
BM: Favorite book no one has heard of?
CMM: Sylvia Cassedy’s Behind the Attic Wall.
BM: Favorite book you were assigned in high school?
CMM: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
BM: Favorite children’s book?
CMM: Tomie dePaola’s Strega Nona.
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Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.” Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She lives in Philadelphia and is the Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.
Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is out now in paperback from Graywolf Press
