Nicole Krauss
Author of Great House suggests:
I'm spending three months in Israel this summer, so almost all the books I'm reading have come out of this tiny piece of land so disproportionately plagued by conflict, rage and grief. Not long ago I read The Last Jew by Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk and was blown away. If the prophets of the Old Testament had read Joyce, Kafka, Márquez, Conrad and Gershom Scholem, listened to American jazz, seen Broadway musicals and heard Lenny Bruce, they might have sounded something like Kaniuk. In my suitcase, I brought three more of his novels: the maniacal, still shocking Adam Resurrected, written in the mid-'60s, Confessions of a Good Arab, whose subversive narrator is half Arab and half Jewish, and Life on Sandpaper, a memoir about the years he spent in New York's Greenwich Village in the '50s.