The Inside Reader: Shaun Levin

Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends - Silas Weir Mitchell

Shaun Levin is another of those author that kindly accepted to do an Inside Reader list when a request arrived from a strange italian woman; actually he has done more than that, he also provided a personal pictures to demonstrate that the books he is suggesting are for real his top 10, since they are right there, on his real shelf (and not a virtual one), ready to be opened and read again and again. So please, welcome Shaun and his quite international list.



Top 10 Books

A couple of years ago I had to move house. My landlord wanted to sell the flat, a flat I’d been living in for the past three years, a place that had, from the start, felt like home. I figured that if I had to move, I would move! I had visions of hitting the road with just a backpack of clothes and books. Nothing is a must-have. It is easy to leave everything behind. The hardest thing to walk out on would be my books. I rely on them to keep writing; their presence on my shelf is often enough. If I had to take ten with me, ten books I couldn’t do without, the ones I’d reread to reaffirm my choice of living as a writer, the books that keep teaching me about the power and outer reaches of the imagination, books that reassure and remind me of the work ahead, they would be these:

[as far as the move went: the economy collapsed, the housing market slumped, and the flat never got sold. I’m still here, me and a few thousand books.]

1) Such Times by Christopher Coe

[In which a dying young man, while watching a game show with his best friend, remembers the great love of his life.]

I will always have a copy of Christopher Coe’s Such Times. Preferably more than one, for as much as I like to lend out my books, and don’t mind if people return them or not, I will always want a copy of Such Times within easy reach. I need it for its language, for each glorious sentence, for the brutal allure of its honesty, for the prayer-like quality of its prose, the deceptive simplicity of this story of love and death and endurance and friendship. If it wasn’t for the plague, this book would never have been written. And if it wasn’t for the plague, Christopher Coe would still be with us, writing works as stunning as this and his only other novel, I Look Divine.

Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (December 1, 1994)
ISBN-10: 0140241434
ISBN-13: 978-0140241433
Amazon: Such Times

In haunting narrative, the acclaimed author of I Look Divine evokes gay life in the 1970s and early '80s and the years of loss that followed. Deftly interweaving past and present, Coe creates a moving portrait of people living on the razor's edge of desire and pays homage to those who now face death for having lived so exuberantly in such times.

2) The Feast of The Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa

[In which we learn about some of the people linked to Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican Republic’s dictator, on the day he is killed – and the aftermath of his assassination – through an intricate weave of characters, timeframes and events.]

I’d want Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of The Goat – one of the fiercest, most relentless and patient books I have read. Sometimes we are given a book casually (like when a Spanish teacher I know gave me a copy of The Feast of the Goat because his English boyfriend gave up on it) and that book changes the way we see the immensity of our subject matter as writers, and the way we look at our lives. The Feast of the Goat reminds me how to tell a story slowly and meticulously, and still maintain an almost unbearable level of suspense. It teaches us how to compose a political story so that it feels like fiction. Great books make you feel privileged to have read them.

Paperback: 416 pages
Publisher: Picador (November 9, 2002)
Publisher Link: http://us.macmillan.com/thefeastofthegoat
ISBN-10: 0312420277
ISBN-13: 978-0312420277
Amazon: The Feast of The Goat

Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of l961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become a way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own. In this 'masterpiece of Latin American and world literature, and one of the finest political novels ever written' (Bookforum), Mario Vargas Llosa recounts the end of a regime and the birth of a terrible democracy, giving voice to the historical Trujillo and the victims, both innocent and complicit, drawn into his deadly orbit.

( books from3 to 10 )

About Shaun Levin: Shaun Levin is the author, most recently, of Snapshots of The Boy (Treehouse Press). His other books include Seven Sweet Things (bluechrome) and A Year of Two Summers (Five Leaves). He lived in Israel for many years before moving to London, where he teaches creative writing. He is the founding editor of Chroma, a queer literary and arts journal. Visit him at shaunlevin.com.

Seven Sweet Things by Shaun Levin
Paperback: 146 pages
Publisher: Lethe Press (July 1, 2010)
ISBN-10: 1590212029
ISBN-13: 978-1590212028
Amazon: Seven Sweet Things: A Novella with Recipes

An affair that begins in an Internet chatroom takes the narrator and his lover, Martin, further into love than either could have imagined. Disturbingly honest and intensely erotic, Seven Sweet Things is as much an exploration of love as it is the lovers' exploration of London. Eking out a living by selling cakes and desserts, the narrator loves reading Plato, sitting on park benches, and feeding his beloved. Each meeting between them is framed by the making, or the promise of a sweet thing (chocolate-coconut fudge bars, oatmeal cookies, rum-glazed chocolate cake, meringues). The landscape shifts from hidden archaeological mysteries in London to a fantastical stay in an old house in Yorkshire, and from Clissold Park in North London to Roslyn Glen in Scotland, where the narrator gets invited to prepare extravagant desserts for an aristocratic family.

The Inside Reader: Shaun Levin

Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends - Silas Weir Mitchell

Shaun Levin is another of those author that kindly accepted to do an Inside Reader list when a request arrived from a strange italian woman; actually he has done more than that, he also provided a personal pictures to demonstrate that the books he is suggesting are for real his top 10, since they are right there, on his real shelf (and not a virtual one), ready to be opened and read again and again. So please, welcome Shaun and his quite international list.



Top 10 Books

A couple of years ago I had to move house. My landlord wanted to sell the flat, a flat I’d been living in for the past three years, a place that had, from the start, felt like home. I figured that if I had to move, I would move! I had visions of hitting the road with just a backpack of clothes and books. Nothing is a must-have. It is easy to leave everything behind. The hardest thing to walk out on would be my books. I rely on them to keep writing; their presence on my shelf is often enough. If I had to take ten with me, ten books I couldn’t do without, the ones I’d reread to reaffirm my choice of living as a writer, the books that keep teaching me about the power and outer reaches of the imagination, books that reassure and remind me of the work ahead, they would be these:

[as far as the move went: the economy collapsed, the housing market slumped, and the flat never got sold. I’m still here, me and a few thousand books.]

1) Such Times by Christopher Coe

[In which a dying young man, while watching a game show with his best friend, remembers the great love of his life.]

I will always have a copy of Christopher Coe’s Such Times. Preferably more than one, for as much as I like to lend out my books, and don’t mind if people return them or not, I will always want a copy of Such Times within easy reach. I need it for its language, for each glorious sentence, for the brutal allure of its honesty, for the prayer-like quality of its prose, the deceptive simplicity of this story of love and death and endurance and friendship. If it wasn’t for the plague, this book would never have been written. And if it wasn’t for the plague, Christopher Coe would still be with us, writing works as stunning as this and his only other novel, I Look Divine.

Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (December 1, 1994)
ISBN-10: 0140241434
ISBN-13: 978-0140241433
Amazon: Such Times

In haunting narrative, the acclaimed author of I Look Divine evokes gay life in the 1970s and early '80s and the years of loss that followed. Deftly interweaving past and present, Coe creates a moving portrait of people living on the razor's edge of desire and pays homage to those who now face death for having lived so exuberantly in such times.

2) The Feast of The Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa

[In which we learn about some of the people linked to Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican Republic’s dictator, on the day he is killed – and the aftermath of his assassination – through an intricate weave of characters, timeframes and events.]

I’d want Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of The Goat – one of the fiercest, most relentless and patient books I have read. Sometimes we are given a book casually (like when a Spanish teacher I know gave me a copy of The Feast of the Goat because his English boyfriend gave up on it) and that book changes the way we see the immensity of our subject matter as writers, and the way we look at our lives. The Feast of the Goat reminds me how to tell a story slowly and meticulously, and still maintain an almost unbearable level of suspense. It teaches us how to compose a political story so that it feels like fiction. Great books make you feel privileged to have read them.

Paperback: 416 pages
Publisher: Picador (November 9, 2002)
Publisher Link: http://us.macmillan.com/thefeastofthegoat
ISBN-10: 0312420277
ISBN-13: 978-0312420277
Amazon: The Feast of The Goat

Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of l961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become a way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own. In this 'masterpiece of Latin American and world literature, and one of the finest political novels ever written' (Bookforum), Mario Vargas Llosa recounts the end of a regime and the birth of a terrible democracy, giving voice to the historical Trujillo and the victims, both innocent and complicit, drawn into his deadly orbit.

( books from3 to 10 )

About Shaun Levin: Shaun Levin is the author, most recently, of Snapshots of The Boy (Treehouse Press). His other books include Seven Sweet Things (bluechrome) and A Year of Two Summers (Five Leaves). He lived in Israel for many years before moving to London, where he teaches creative writing. He is the founding editor of Chroma, a queer literary and arts journal. Visit him at shaunlevin.com.

Seven Sweet Things by Shaun Levin
Paperback: 146 pages
Publisher: Lethe Press (July 1, 2010)
ISBN-10: 1590212029
ISBN-13: 978-1590212028
Amazon: Seven Sweet Things: A Novella with Recipes

An affair that begins in an Internet chatroom takes the narrator and his lover, Martin, further into love than either could have imagined. Disturbingly honest and intensely erotic, Seven Sweet Things is as much an exploration of love as it is the lovers' exploration of London. Eking out a living by selling cakes and desserts, the narrator loves reading Plato, sitting on park benches, and feeding his beloved. Each meeting between them is framed by the making, or the promise of a sweet thing (chocolate-coconut fudge bars, oatmeal cookies, rum-glazed chocolate cake, meringues). The landscape shifts from hidden archaeological mysteries in London to a fantastical stay in an old house in Yorkshire, and from Clissold Park in North London to Roslyn Glen in Scotland, where the narrator gets invited to prepare extravagant desserts for an aristocratic family.