By the Book With Julie Otsuka: “My ideal reading experience: late afternoon, my neighborhood cafe, a seat in the back corner, a slight coffee buzz”

From a New York Times By the Book column headlined “A Man in a Cafe Asked Julie Otsuka What We Was Reading. They Dated for Two Years.”:

“An everyday pickup line, but it worked,” says the novelist Julie Otsuka, whose new book is “The Swimmers.” “I haven’t been in touch with him since, but I return to ‘The Lover’ every now and again, and never fail to fall under its spell.”

What books are on your night stand?

“Visitation,” by Jenny Erpenbeck. “Open Water,” by Caleb Azumah Nelson. “Severance,” by Ling Ma. “Real Estate: A Living Autobiography,” by Deborah Levy. “The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping,” by Samantha Harvey. “Festival Days,” by JoAnn Beard. “Leave the World Behind,” by Rumaan Alam.

What’s the last great book you read?

“To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life,” by the French writer Hervé Guibert.

Describe your ideal reading experience.

Like many writers, I’m a very solitary person, but I love reading and working in public spaces. My ideal reading experience: late afternoon, pre-pandemic, my neighborhood cafe, a seat in the far back corner, a slight coffee buzz. All around me, the pleasant hum of human voices. In front of me, on the table, a book, a pencil for underlining, a pen and a small unlined Muji notebook, in case I run across a sentence I want to write down, or overhear a good snatch of dialogue (which could end up in my next novel)….

What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?

“Suicide,” by the French writer Edouard Levé. This book carved out a tiny hole in my heart. Narrated in the “you” voice, and addressed to a friend who committed suicide 20 years earlier, the novel is a meditation on both the dead friend’s life and the act of suicide itself, as well as a farewell note from the author, who took his own life 10 days after turning in the manuscript, to his former self and to us, the reader. Through an accretion of small, obsessive details, “you” slowly comes into focus as a thoughtful, solitary, troubled man who can no longer bear to be in the world. The language is beautiful and spare, deceptively simple, exactingly precise. I’ve never read anything like it. It is, one could say, the ultimate work of autofiction.

Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?

I will read anything by Rachel Cusk, who is doing some of the most interesting work of any writer around, and Katie Kitamura, whose recent novel “Intimacies” is both sleekly gorgeous — those sentences — and psychologically unnerving. She’s an absolutely brilliant writer. Other writers whose work I admire: Colson Whitehead, Mohsin Hamid, Jamaica Kincaid, David Szalay and Deborah Levy, especially her “Living Autobiography” trilogy. For sheer inventiveness of form, the short stories of David Means. I would do anything to read a new short story by Julie Hecht, who gets my vote for funniest writer. I am very interested in the plays of Will Eno, master of the profound and the absurd. Also, the work of Wallace Shawn. For thoughtful commentary on race: Claudia Rankine, Cathy Park Hong, Ta-Nehisi Coates. And the wonderfully irreverent journalist Jay Caspian Kang, who tells it like it is….

What writers are especially good on mother-daughter relationships?

Nobody describes the passionate bond between mothers and daughters more brutally, or with more honesty, intelligence and style, than Vivian Gornick in her memoir “Fierce Attachments.”