Welcome to the Book Marks Questionnaire, where we ask authors questions about the books that have shaped them.
This week, we spoke to HEX author Rebecca Dinnerstein Knight.
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Book Marks: First book you remember loving?
Rebecca Dinerstein Knight: Anne of Green Gables. I wanted to love anything as much as Anne loves the canopy of apple branches.
BM: Favorite re-read?
RDK: Jane Eyre. Daily lessons in soul integrity and the sublime.
BM: What book do you think your book is most in conversation with?
RDK: Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy and maybe some specter of Grace Paley’s grocery list.
BM: A book that blew your mind?
RDK: Portrait of a Marriage by Nigel Nicolson. 1920s pansexuality told in the most articulate fugue.
BM: A book that actually made you laugh out loud?
RDK: Selected Writings of Walter Pater.
BM: Favorite book to give as a gift?
RDK: Changing by Liv Ullmann.
BM: Favorite book no one has heard of?
RDK: The Blue Octavio Notebooks by Kafka.
BM: Favorite book of the 21st century?
RDK: Averno by Louise Glück.
BM: Favorite book you were assigned in high school?
RDK: All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, for Mr. Grossman’s Great Books class.
BM: Favorite children’s book?
RDK: Curious George (the paper sailboats one, the one with the rabbits)
BM: Book you wish would be adapted for a film/tv show?
RDK: I’m working on a mashup of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Portrait of a Marriage, and Vita Sackville-West’s Challenge as a bio-romp of British literary erotic escapades.
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Rebecca Dinerstein Knight‘s new novel is HEX . Her first novel The Sunlit Night premiered as a feature film at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Knight has reviewed restaurants for The Village Voice and novels for The New York Times Book Review, and her essays have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times, among others. The recipient of a Wallant Award for Jewish Literature, she lives and writes in New Hampshire.
Rebecca Dinerstein Knight’s HEX is out now from Viking
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