Welcome to the Book Marks Questionnaire, where we ask authors questions about the books that have shaped them.
This week, we spoke to The Incendiaries author R.O. Kwon.
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Book Marks: A book that blew your mind?
R.O. Kwon: Miriam Toews’s Women Talking
BM: Last book you read?
RK: Camille Dungy’s Guidebook to Relative Strangers (reread)
BM: A book that made you cry?
RK: Mira Jacob’s Good Talk
BM: What book from the past year would you like to give a shout-out to?
RK: Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias
BM: A book that actually made you laugh out loud?
RK: C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold
BM: Favorite book to give as a gift?
RK: Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends
BM: Favorite book no one has heard of?
RK: Penelope Fitzgerald’s Blue Flower
BM: Favorite book you were assigned in high school?
RK: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
BM: Book(s) you’re reading right now?
RK: A Map Is Only One Story, ed. Nicole Chung and Mensah Demary
BM: Favorite children’s book?
RK: Jenny Offill’s Sparky
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R.O. Kwon’s nationally bestselling first novel, The Incendiaries, is published by Riverhead (U.S.) and Virago/Little Brown (U.K.), and it is being translated into six languages. Named a best book of the year by over forty publications, The Incendiaries was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award for Best First Book, Los Angeles Times First Book Prize, and Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Fiction Prize. Kwon’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Buzzfeed, NPR, and elsewhere.
R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries is out now in paperback from Riverhead
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