Helen Oyeyemi on Mariah Carey, Arthurian Legends, and Spending the Night at the Bront?s’
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Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you’re here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.
If you like fanciful train travel and mongooses, perhaps Helen Oyeyemi’s latest novel (her seventh), Peaces, is for you. During high school, the Nigeria-born, London-raised author wrote her first novel, The Icarus Girl, which was published while she was at Cambridge. But before that, she once rewrote the ending to Little Women in a library copy to suit her taste (Jo marries Laurie; Beth lives).
Besides alternate endings, she’s written a short story collection (the PEN Open Book Award-winning What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours) and two plays. She collects teapots and keys, maintains an Etsy wish list, is a fan of Killing Eve, and her dream job is writing K-dramas. Named to Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists list, she lives in Prague.
The book that:
…helped me through a loss:
Tullia d’Aragona’s Dialogue on the Infinity of Love, translated by Rinaldina Russell and Bruce Merry.
…I recommend over and over again:
Cookie Mueller’s Walking through Clear Water In A Pool Painted Black.
…shaped my worldview:
Le Morte D’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory.
…currently sits on my nightstand:
Luckenbooth, by Jenni Fagan (excitement 2021!).
…I’d pass onto a kid:
The Power of Cute by Simon May.
…I’d like turned into a Netflix show:
A trio of books, really: Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt Mysteries. [Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway, and The Infinite Blacktop.]
…I last bought:
Not Dead But Sleeping by Anna Della Subin.
…has the greatest ending:
Middlemarch by George Eliot.
...I brought on a momentous trip:
This was probably the very best night of my life so far: the night I got to sleep over at the Bront? parsonage in Haworth !!!! (I still can’t quite believe it actually happened.) I was too keyed up to sleep properly. I was in a room situated between Emily and Charlotte’s bedrooms, lying in a four poster bed frame that had belonged to their father, and it just felt like my heart had grabbed my brain by the elbow and was just galloping around and around with it. Luckily I had [Jorge Luis] Borges’ Collected Fictions (translated by Andrew Hurley) on my e-reader, and they kept me company until my eyes closed…and probably afterwards, too.
…makes me feel seen:
Anna édes by Dezs? Kosztolányi, translated by global treasure George Szirtes.
…I’d want signed by the author:
The Meaning of Mariah Carey. (Living in hope...if the Bront? thing could happen, maybe this could, too?!?!)
If I could live in any library or bookstore in the world, it would be…
The library at Prague’s Strahov Monastery.
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