BEST AUTHOR BEST : GARTH GREENWELL

The novelist and essayist argues for ''more productive, less facile conversations about '' affirming " literature and '' positive representation, '' even in books considered canonical. His new novel is '' Small Rain.''

.-  What books are on your night stand?

What tends to accumulate is a mix of active pleasure reading, books I hope to pleasure-read very soon and anything I might want a sip of before sleep. It rotates seasonally; It's a mess. A selection

.-  Poetry : James Longenbach, '' Seafarer '' ;  Lynn Xu, '' Debts & Lessons ''; Shakespeare's sonnets.

.-  Fiction : Maya Binyam, '' Hangman '' ; Kevin Lambert, '' May Our Joy Endure'' [ translated by Donald Winkler ] ; Mark Habber, '' Lesser Ruins.'' 

.-  Nonfiction : Francois Truffaut, '' The Films in My Life '' [ translated by Leonard Mayhew ] ; Ryan Coyne, '' Heidegger's Confessions.''

.-  Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?

It's not a novel, but a couple of friends and I are reading Heidegger's '' Being and Time,'' which I've always been intimidated by. Being intimidated by books is an old, deep-seated impulse ; it's always a waste of time.

.-  Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?

It's amazing how angry some people get when they hear you're reading Heidegger.

.-  What's your favorite book no one else has heard of?

For years my answer has been Pedro Lemebel's  '' My Tender Matador '' ; I can now add the new Penguin selection of his cronicas. He's one of the world's great writers ; everyone should read him.

.- What's the last book you read that made you laugh?

Miranda July, '' All Fours.''

.-  Are there responses to your much discussed  Yale review essay, '' A Moral Education,'' that you're still thinking about?

I expected the essay to spark many more negative responses that it received. Maybe they're still coming.

.-  Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?

My response to art doesn't hinge subject matter,  and my only wish is that authors write the books they feel they have to write. That kind of urgency makes any subject revelatory.

But the revelation comes in form, in the material stuff out of which art is made, which for writers means language. I wish more writers would pursue their formal obsessions : experiments with time, with perspective,  with the diction and sentence shapes that excite them.

The World Students Society thanks The New York Times.