Shelf Life: Téa Obreht

In another life, Téa Obreht might have been a zoologist. But in this one, she’s the youngest ever Orange Prize winner, for The Tiger’s Wife, and now comes her third novel, The Morningside (Random House.) (Obreht was driving when she found out her debut had also been nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction.) Her second book, Inland, which is based in the American West, won the Ballard Prize and a Southwest Book Award; was a finalist for the 2020 Dylan Thomas prize and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Fiction, Dublin Literary Award, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize; and was on President Obama’s summer 2019 reading list. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and New Yorker 20 best American fiction writers under 40 (at age 24–her age comes up a lot).

The Belgrade-born, Wyoming-based author grew up in Cyprus and Egypt; moved to Georgia in the American South; writes in English and thinks in Serbian; studied creative writing at USC at age 16 (she started high school in Palo Alto at 12, having skipped 2 grades) and earned her MFA at Cornell; writes under her economist mother’s maiden name (a request from her aeronautical engineer grandfather); has a toddler daughter and an English Springer Spaniel named Gully (short for Gulliver); was Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Texas State University in San Marcos and currently teaches fiction at Bennington College; wrote an intro to the 75th anniversary edition of Animal Farm; went vampire hunting for Harper’s and reminisced about Bruce Springsteen (her first rock concert) in Vogue; is a night owl; bought vegetable wash even before the pandemic; once tossed 1,400 pages of 2 unfinished novels into the trash; and ditched reading Nabokov for a seatmate’s copy of Dan Brown on a flight.

Fascinated by: History. Afraid of: Death. Fan of: Podcasts, David Attenborough and nature documentaries, wandering, YA and children’s books, Salvador Dali art, the film Rebecca; Central Market in Austin; kitchen sink cookies from Lux Coffee in Flagstaff, AZ; Pisticci and Kafana restaurants in NYC; being in a car. Let her book picks move you.

The book that…

…made me weep uncontrollably:

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. For years, I’ve been trying to muster the emotional strength to dress as “Mr. Stevens’s Regrets” for Halloween, but I fear the construction of the costume would send me into a spiral.

…I recommend over and over again:

Vesna Goldsworthy’s Iron Curtain. And, quite frankly, all of her work.

…currently sits on my nightstand:

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland. I actually finished it a good while ago, but I go back to it so often I can’t bear to move it to a more inaccessible place.

…I’d pass on to my kid:

My battered, yellowed, falling-apart paperback of Sheila Burnford’s The Incredible Journey, which I pilfered from the library of my school in Cairo when I was 8 or 9 years old.

…made me laugh out loud:

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters. What a storyteller, what a wit, what juicy sentences that turn on a dime.

…I’d like turned into a TV show:

The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead’s genre-bending first novel, which explores race, structural power, and legacies of expertise through the sudden unraveling of an elevator inspector’s career.

…I last bought:

I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen. We already own a copy, and actually have an additional one on loan from the library, but my toddler saw it in the bookstore, thought it was hers, and wouldn’t leave without it.

…has the best title:

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, who apparently wasn’t satisfied with one perfect title, but had to take a second—The Evening Redness in the West—for the same damn book.

…has the best opening line:

Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove: “When Augustus came out on the porch, the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake—not a very big one.”

…features a character I love to hate:

Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. My contempt for cold, surly Maxim de Winter has, over my many years of love for this novel, grown to encompass our narrator, the second Mrs. de Winter—so these days I pretty much find myself siding with Mrs. Danvers.

…is a master class on dialogue:

Melissa Bank’s superb short story collection, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing. Every single one of us has that sharp, acerbic heroine we wish we sounded like, and Jane Rosenal is mine.

…everyone should read:

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. The Devil you know has his origins in this masterpiece of Russian literature—why not get acquainted with the rest of his entourage?

The literary organization/charity I support:

The War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo.