(This list is amended at whim: maybe hourly, possibly annually.)
1. While spending time in Berlin, I fell hard for an English-language bookstore (owned by Czechs) where they boil/bake their own bagels. Here’s their back room:
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2. If I could live in any museum, it’d be the Dia:Beacon.
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3. If you ask me what to read these days, I’ll probably send you toward Percival Everett or Lydia Millet.
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4. I’ve been known make the students in my fiction workshop read Sven Birkerts’s Reading in a Digital Age.
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5. Here’s my Sharpie-inscribed copy of David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green:
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6. See the pic on this site’s “Contact” page? That’s my bamboo keyboard.
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7. Here I am standing in front of Mont Blanc’s peak. I’m smiling because they serve coffee up there:
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8. If you’re interested in what it’s like to write long-form fiction, don’t miss Alexander Chee’s 100 Things About a Novel.
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9. When it comes to on-screen pairings, my vote will always go to Jack and Sissy (Missing, 1982):
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11. As for my Trader Joe’s addiction, I’m working on it.
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12. And finally: I wrote much of my most recent manuscript in Paris’s Bibliotheque Mazarine, with frequent forays to the American Library in Paris. Basically this: Paris’s bookstores and libraries and paperback stalls make my heart swoon. So many books in that city. So much to love.
Allison Lynn 