BEST AUTHOR -[2] BEST : BILLY COLLINS

 

.-  What books are currently on your night stand?

Maeve Brennan, '' The Long-Winded Lady,'' a collection of her Talk of the Town pieces ; James Wood, '' How Fiction Works'' ; '' The Letters of Seamus Heaney ''; Richard Panek's ''The Trouble With Gravity'' and ''Pillars of Creation'' ; John Avlon, '' Lincoln and the Fight for Peace'' ; Lily Brooks Dalton, '' The Light Pirate '' ; Rowan Ricardo Phillips, '' Living Weapons'' ; and, as always, Emerson : '' Essays and Lectures.''

.-  What's the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

From a book on primates, I recently learned that chimps, monkeys and gorillas all peel bananas from the opposite end from us and use the stem as a handle. I even wrote a poem about how I made the switch.

.- What books would people be surprised to find on your shelves?

Andrew Beyer's '' The Winning HorsePlayer '' and Thomas Eakins's ''A Drawing Manual.''

.-  What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?

Life has become too short for “Middlemarch,” “A Dance to the Music of Time,” “The Alexandria Quartet” and lots of others I’m too ashamed even to mention.

.-  What's the last book you recommended to a member of your family?

Niall Williams's '' This is Happiness '' may sound like self-help, but its a beautiful humorous novel-memoir about life in an imagined village in the west of Ireland. The language is a joyride; even Williams's sentences structures can be amusing.

.-  In 2014 interview you said you'd stopped reading poems. Is that still true?

Did I really say that? I must have been having a moment. I read poems every day, but I often don't finish them for reasons it would require a workshop to explain.

We All have our deal-breakers John Ciardi, the poetry editor of Times Saturday Review, balked at any name from classical mythology. I find that family members can burden a poem, especially if they happen to be dead.

So if I come across '' Dad '' or '' Mommy, '' I am out. '' Grandma '' gets a pass.

.-  You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

Meeting the author whom you admire is one of our life's most reliably disappointing experiences,  starting with what they are wearing. But I would like to test that truism by inviting Nabokov, Flannery O' Connor and Melville. Plus Ann Patchett cooking, would explain the 21st century to others.

The World Student Society thanks The New York Times.