What Writers Are Reading: Paul Yoon, Susan Orlean & Robert Kolker

Paul Yoon

I’m a huge fan of Álvaro Enrigue, so I was really excited when his new one, You Dreamed of Empires, came out — it’s definitely the book of the year for me. Or, for that matter, the book of many years. If someone were to ask me what a writer can do with the imagination, I can happily hand them this brief, beautiful, supernova-of-feelings novel that is set in a time and place that is so far from us but seems so much about us. It just stroked my cheek, leaned in, and completely seduced me. It was like falling in love. Eh, scratch that: it’s love. There, I said it: I LOVE this book so much it makes me want to scream.

Paul Yoon is the author most recently of The Hive and the Honey.

Susan Orlean

I’m reading Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful. It’s a beautifully written memoir of a failed marriage that ends up being about so much more — parenting, fame, womanhood, being alive, being a writer. I love it.

Susan Orlean is the author most recently of On Animals.

Robert Kolker

I recently tore through The Spy and the Traitor, Ben McIntyre’s stunning, stranger-than-fiction 2018 account of a Soviet double agent who spied for the West for decades. I grew up during the final years of the Cold War and knew nothing about this story, but as I read I felt like I was getting a clear view of those years for the first time: How close we were, really, to nuclear catastrophe, and how amazing that a small group of people did so much to stop that from happening. The story itself is often terrifying and (in its discussions of the weird folkways of spies and Kremlin and London bureaucracies) sometimes hilarious. And the final act is certainly better than any action movie I’ve seen in years.

Robert Kolker is the author most recently of Hidden Valley Road.