Sunday, August 01, 2010

What is Anthony Doerr reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Anthony Doerr, author of the new story collection Memory Wall.

His entry begins:
I'm reading an ARC of Gary Shtyengart's Super Sad True Love Story, a vision of the near-future in which China carries all of America's debt, books are obsolete, government proclamations are misspelled, and we carry around absorbing devices called apparats which stream thick rivers of information at us at all times. It would be a very funny book if...[read on]
Among the early praise for Memory Wall:
"When I finished the last page of Anthony Doerr's Memory Wall, I sat stunned and blinking, unable to leave the strange and vivid and utterly believable world he'd created. Read this book—it will change how you think about memory, time, love, and the way we record and try to keep the things we can't live without."
—Maile Meloy, author of Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

"It's fair to say that Anthony Doerr is doing things with the short story that have rarely been attempted and seldom achieved. The stories in Memory Wall have such scope and depth that they hit as hard as novels three times their length. Doerr has set a new standard, I think, for what a story can do."
—Dave Eggers, author of Zeitoun and What Is the What

"Memory Wall not only captivates from start to finish, it is the kind of book likely to restore your faith in the pleasures of storytelling…. It's rare to encounter a writer who is able to make us see the world around us in new ways. And yet Doerr does so on every page."
Boston Globe
Visit Anthony Doerr's website.

The Page 69 Test: Anthony Doerr's Four Seasons in Rome.

Writers Read: Anthony Doerr.

--Marshal Zeringue