Shelf Life: Tommy Orange
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.
Tommy Orange ended up working at a bookstore where he fell in love with reading and writing because he couldn’t get a job after college with his sound engineering degree. His first book, There There, was a finalist for a 2019 Pulitzer Prize and last year’s One Book, One Chicago selection. The 2018 novel, about Native Americans descending on an annual pow-wow, also won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and an American Book Award; was shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and longlisted for the National Book Award; and was one of the NYT Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year.
Now comes his second novel, Wandering Stars (Knopf), about the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and which, like his debut, draws on Orange’s heritage as an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma and includes some of the same characters.
The Oakland-born, -raised, and -based Orange (he worked at the Native American Health Center there, where he created a media lab) has an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he currently teaches, was a MacDowell and Writing by Writers fellow, runs an average of seven miles a day, wrote Dear Mr. Marlon Brando commissioned by the SFMOMA’s Open Space platform and published in Alcatraz Is Not an Island for the 50th anniversary of the Indigenous Occupation of Alcatraz and an op-ed on why Thanksgiving is a complicated holiday, played roller hockey nationally from 14 to 24 then became a musician at 18.
Likes: Lake Merritt in Oakland and writing in hotel rooms, Rutherford Falls and electronic music producer Clark. Dislikes: Public speaking. Inspo: Louise Erdrich
He’s currently at work on a third novel.
The book that…
…made me weep uncontrollably:
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, because it is a perfect novel and that it had to end but also the way it ended devastated me. I will re-read and re-read this book my whole life.
…I recommend over and over again:
Lately I’ve been telling everyone to read Benjamin Labatut, his When We Cease to Understand the World and his new The Maniac are insanely good.
…I swear I’ll finish one day:
Moby Dick. I keep trying, and I’ll get there one day. I have a massive hole in regards to the classics.
…I read in one sitting, it was that good:
Songs on Endless Repeat by Anthony Veasna So. Such a loss. We get fragments of a novel we will never get to read called Straight Through Cambotown.
…currently sits on my nightstand:
I don’t have a nightstand but what I’m currently most actively reading is Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright which is INCREDIBLE.
…made me laugh out loud:
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole was the first book to make me laugh at all. I didn’t know it could be done!
…I’d like turned into a TV show:
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James. (I think it is coming soon.)
…I last bought:
A Shining by Jon Fosse. His Septology is a little daunting but A Shining is only 74 pages long!
…has the best opening line:
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector: “Everything in the world began with a yes.”
…I brought on my first trip to Europe:
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. It was my first time reading it, and I finished it on a ferry from Nice, France to Corsica. Every American needs to read this book.