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 Of Women and Salt, Gabriela Garcia.
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Book Marks: Favorite re-read?
Gabriela Garcia: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.
BM: A book that blew your mind?
GG: The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson.
BM: Last book you read?
GG: The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen.
BM: What book from the past year would you like to give a shout-out to?
GG: Days of Distraction by Alexandra Chang.
BM: A book that actually made you laugh out loud?
GG: Erasure by Percival Everett.
BM: What’s one book you wish you had read during your teenage years?
GG: Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Diaz.
BM: Favorite book to give as a gift?
GG: Speak Low by Carl Phillips.
BM: Classic book you hate?
GG: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.
BM: Classic book on your To Be Read pile?
GG: The Street by Ann Petry.
BM: What’s a book with a really great sex scene?
GG: The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters.
BM: Favorite book you were assigned in high school?
GG: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
BM: Book(s) you’re reading right now?
GG: Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses and Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So.
BM: Book you wish would be adapted for a film/tv show?
GG: Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg.
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Gabriela Garcia is the author of the novel Of Women and Salt, forthcoming from Flatiron (US), Picador (UK), and in seven other languages. Her fiction and poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Tin House, Zyzzyva, Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a Steinbeck Fellowship, and residencies and fellowships from Breadloaf, Sarabande Books, Lighthouse Works, the Keller Estate, and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. She has an MFA in fiction from Purdue University, where she also taught creative writing.
The daughter of immigrants from Cuba and Mexico, Gabriela was raised in Miami and currently lives in the Bay Area. In her past life she worked in music, magazines, technology, and feminist and immigrant rights organizing.
Gabriela Garcia’s Of Women and Salt is out now from Flatiron Books
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