My MFA reading list for May Residency 2011

“As I Lay Dying” by William Faulkner

“Room” by Emma Donoghue

“Tiny, Smiling Daddy” by Mary Gaitskill (Because They Wanted To: Stories)

“And of Clay Are We Created” by Isabel Allende (The Stories of Eva Luna)

 “Shiloh” by Bobby Ann Mason (Shiloh and other Stories)

“A Painful Case” by James Joyce (Dubliners)

“Beginning Theory” by Peter Barry, third edition

“Fragment of the Head of a Queen” by Cate Marvin

“Lighthead” by Terrance Hayes

“The Eternal City” by Kathleen Graber

“The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake” by Breece D’J Pancake

“Devil in a Blue Dress” by Walter Mosley

 “Goat” by Brad Land

“On Looking” by Lia Purpura

“Brokeback Mountain” Short Story to Screenplay (Paperback/Movie) by Annie Proulx, Larry McMurtry, Diana Ossana

“Glengarry Glen Ross: A Play” (Paperback/Movie) by David Mamet

“Writing for Emotional Impact” by Karl Iglesias

My MFA reading list for Winter Residency 2011

James Salter's A Sport and A Pastime.

Mary Gordon's Spending

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita

JG Ballard's Crash

Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer

Scott Spencer's Endless Love

Erica Jong's Fear of Flying.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, Edited by Tobias Wolff

Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever

Beebe Moore-Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine

Jeannette Winterson's The Passion

Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter

Twentieth Century American Poetry by Gioia, Mason, Schoerke et al

Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town

The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction

The Best American Essays

Ursula K. Le Guin's Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew

Write Screenplays That Sell...The Ackerman Way

A Haitian Reading List

Relatedto my post on Alejo Carpentier's book, I've lately been making an effort to read some books about Haiti and its people. It's part of my goal to better understand the Dominican Republic's history. My reading list is pretty incomplete, and suggestions are always welcome, but here it is as it stands:

-Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World

-Hubert Cole's Christophe: King of Haiti

-Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse

-Michelle Wucker's Why the Cocks Fight

-John W. Vandercook's Black Majesty (a racist book from 1930! no, RACIST. I didn't know when I bought it.)

-Edwige Danticat's The Farming of Bones

Pretty slight, no? One thing I'd love to have is a really comprehensive history of Haiti. I can get a little early history from my Dominican history text, and a little from Zora Neale Hurston's book, but I'd really benefit from a Haitian history primer.

My MFA reading list for May Residency 2010

Longer Works:

The Blue Flower (Penelope Fitzgerald)

From Where We Dream (Robert Olen Butler)

Loss of Face (Charles Baxter)

Mao II (Don DeLillo)

Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1993

The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Stop-Time (Frank Conroy)

I Could Tell You Stories (Patricia Hampl)

Sound and Sense (Perrine)

Spreading the Word: Editors on Poetry (Corey and Slesinger)

The Sweet Hereafter (screenplay) (Atom Egoyan)

Doubt (screenplay) (John Patrick Stanley)

Short Stories:

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? (Joyce Carol Oates)

A Good Man is Hard to Find (Flannery O’Connor)

Sonny’s Blues (James Baldwin)

The Magic Barrel (Bernard Malemud)

From “Sudden Fiction”:

Five Ives (Roy Blount Jr.)

The Moving (James Still)

Yours (Mary Robinson)

Popular Mechanics (Raymond Carver)

Say Yes (Tobias Wolff)

The Hit Man (TC Boyle)

I See You Never (Ray Bradbury)

Dinner Time (Russell Edson)

The Anatomy of Desire (John L’Heureux)

Class Notes (Lucas Cooper)

Tickits (Paul Milenski)

The Sock (Lydia Davis)

Any Minute… (David Ordan)

Blind Girls (Jayne Anne Phillips)

I feel sometimes like my lack of love for/ memory of The Great Gatsby is some sort of moral failure. I feel guilty just thinking about it. Obviously I am extremely excited about re-purchasing and re-reading it. Obviously.

My MFA reading list for Winter Residency 2010

Longer Works:

The Rings of Saturn(WG Sebald)

Coming Through Slaughter (Michael Ondaatje)

The Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger)

Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)

Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates)

The Collected Stories of Robert Walser

The Crying Game (script; Neil Jordan)

Play (script; Samuel Beckett)

Jelly Roll (Kevin Young)

Gulf Music (Robert Pinsky)

Assorted Poems of Susan Wheeler

Short Stories:

The Love of a Good Woman (Alice Munro)

The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore (Sherman Alexie)

In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried (Amy Hempel)

Big Bertha Stories (Bobbie Ann Mason)

Three Calling Birds, Three French Hens (Lorrie Moore)

Everything That Rises Must Converge (Flannery O’Connor)

Your Were Perfectly Fine (Dorothy Parker)

The Catbird Seat (James Thurber)

The Enormous Radio (John Cheever)

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (Mark Twain)

Zoellner’s Definition (Murray Bail)

Where I’m Calling From (Raymond Carver)

Pet Milk (Stuart Dybek)

A Family Supper (Kazuo Ishiguro)

Tergvinder’s Stone (WS Merwin)

Lust (Susan Minot)

Dr. Henry Selwyn (WG Sebald)