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 The Parisian author Isabella Hammad
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Book Marks: First book you remember loving?
Isabella Hammad: As a child I loved Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through The Looking Glass. The first grown-up book was probably George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. It was also I think my first encounter with the word “wench.”
BM: A book that blew your mind?
IH: Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
BM: Last book you read?
IH: Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School
BM: A book that made you cry?
IH: Amy Hempel’s Collected Stories, specifically “The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried”
BM: A book that actually made you laugh out loud?
IH: Most recently At Freddie’s by Penelope Fitzgerald had me cackling quite a bit
BM: Favorite book to give as a gift?
IH: I keep telling people to read The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère. Does an insistent recommendation count as a gift? I’m not sure, but a lot of people have obeyed me…
BM: Classic book you hate?
IH: I don’t think I liked Villette very much, although hate is a strong word. I didn’t much care for Little Dorrit. Dickens’s female characters can be pretty insipid.
BM: Classic book on your To Be Read pile?
IH: All of Proust
BM: Favorite book you were assigned in high school?
IH: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
BM: Book(s) you’re reading right now?
IH: This Little Art by Kate Briggs, Then The Fish Swallowed Him by Amir Ahmadi Arian, Forthcoming by Jalal Toufic
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Isabella Hammad is the author of The Parisian. She was awarded the Plimpton Prize, the O. Henry Award, and the Palestine Book Award, and is a 2019 National Book Award 5 Under 35 Honoree. She was born in London and lives between London and New York.
Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian is out now in paperback from Grove
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