Katherine A. Powers: The Reader, Live

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We're always thrilled to see one of our many wonderful contributors get some well-deserved attention, and this marvelous interview with Katherine A. Powers, a regular BN Review contributor and a columnist for the Boston Globe, is a treat for any book lover, as well as for those of us who admire Katherine's vast reading experience and wizardly way with a sentence.

In a revealing dialogue with Eric Forbes,  Katherine discusses her "favorite living novelist" -- that would be True Grit author Charles Portis.  She particularly recommends his novel Masters of Atlantis, calling it  "poignant in its own very odd way and also a deadpan engagement with the American language, especially in its optimistic entrepreneurial character."

But that's just one moment in a conversation that includes a supreme example of the best sort of literary irony, a list of authors she re-reads regularly, and some notes on books, new and old, that have yet to get the attention they deserve.  Go now and read the whole thing.

For more of Katherine's insightful contributions in these pages, check out her recent reviews of Rose Tremain's Trespass and Ben McIntyre's Operation Mincemeat (both of which she mentions in the interview), and her essay on a new collection of H.L. Mencken's "Prejudices."  And a comprehensive list of Katherine's articles for the Review can be found here.

Hat tip: Steve Donoghue of Open Letters Monthly, whose post about the interview alerted us to it.

-BILL TIPPER