BEST AUTHOR BEST : ADAM HASLETT [2]

 

.-  Which literary mothers and sons loom large for you?

To be honest, the echo I had in mind in choosing the title was with Turgenev's '' Fathers and Sons, '' given the theme of incomprehension between generations in that book, as well as the friendship between the two younger men at the heart of the story.

.-  What impact has teaching had on your writing?

A sporadic one, as I've only taught sporadically, but of late, as I get older, I would say it offers me the chance to approach writing - that of my students, but also my own - with more curiosity and less judgment.

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

'' Harrow, '' by Joy Williams.

.-  What's the best book you've ever received as a gift?

For its timing, I'd say '' A Home at the End of the World,'' by Michael Cunningham. My sister gave it to me for Christmas when I was 20.

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

How people experience the jobs they do; how, where, when and why people experience wonder and awe ; and also politics, not in the electoral sense but in the lived sense.

It's so hard to do, particularly now, but so needed. We fight politically in two dimensions, but live in at least four.

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

According to Ray Monk's brilliant biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein may have met  Virginia Woolf at one of John Maynard Keynes's parties, but '' neither seems to have made much impression on the other.''

[ Wittgenstein was often stiff or rude around women.] Rather than organize another party, I'd like to have been seated between them at that one.

I somehow imagine myself easing Wittgenstein's rigidity and drawing the two of them into a conversation about the pleasures of language and the balance between faith and doubt in a writer or thinker's life.

The World Students Society thanks The New York Times.