Welcome to the Book Marks Questionnaire, where we ask authors questions about the books that have shaped them.
This week, we spoke to spoke to Fruit of the Drunken Tree author Ingrid Rojas Contreras.
*
Book Marks: Favorite re-read?
Ingrid Rojas Contreras: I love to re-read One Hundred Years of Solitude, sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish, and sometimes both at the same time.
BM: A book that blew your mind?
IRC: Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo.
BM: Last book you read?
IRC: Terese Marie Mailhot’s incredible Heart Berries.
BM: A book that made you cry?
IRC: Anaïs Nin’s diaries.
BM: Favorite book to give as a gift?
IRC: Nabokov’s Speak Memory or Alexander Chee’s How To Write an Autobiographical Novel.
BM: Classic book you hate?
IRC: I cannot stand On The Road—it annoys me to no end, and it has not aged well.
BM: Favorite book no one has heard of?
IRC: Leanne Shapton’s Guestbook—it’s a brilliant experimental photo meets fiction book about ghosts and hauntings.
BM: Favorite book of the 21st century?
IRC: Solmaz Sharif’s Look.
BM: Favorite book you were assigned in high school?
IRC: Don Quixote.
BM: Book(s) you’re reading right now?
IRC: Esme Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias.
*
Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was a silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Paris Review, Buzzfeed, Nylon, Guernica, and elsewhere. She is working on a family memoir about her grandfather, a curandero from Colombia who it was said had the power to move clouds.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ Fruit of the Drunken Tree is out now in paperback
*
