(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:
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.
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.
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.
9. When it comes to on-screen pairings, my vote will always go to Jack and Sissy (Missing, 1982):
.11. As for my Trader Joe’s addiction, I’m working on it.
.12. And finally: I wrote much of my most recent manuscript in Paris’s Bibliotheque Mazarine, whose reading room I consider one of the most beautiful book-lined spaces in the world. Tall shelves and green-shaded desk lamps, chandeliers and leather bindings, marble busts and friendly librarians: These are the things that make my heart swell.
Allison Lynn 