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This form of 20 Questions must be a new publicity angle, as I just saw the same questions posed of Jonathan Franzen. Because Donna's new novel, The Goldfinch, has a laydown date of (this) Tuesday, which book garners a lot of interest here and elsewhere, I share her complete and fascinating remarks below.
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Donna Tartt: By the Book
The author of The Goldfinch and The Secret History says that personally, “to paraphrase Nabokov: all I want from a book is the tingle down the spine, for my hairs to stand on end.”

What are you reading at the moment? Are you a one-book-at-a-time person?

I’ve always got a dozen books going, which is why my suitcases are always so heavy. At the moment: Am greatly enjoying the Neversink Library reissue of Jean Cocteau’s “Difficulty of Being,” since my copy from college is so torn up the pages are falling out. Am also loving Rachel Kushner’s “Telex From Cuba” and Gilbert Highet’s “Poets in a Landscape,” a charming appreciation of Catullus and Propertius and the Latin poets. (I love almost all the reissues of the New York Review Books Classics — at the Corner Bookstore, uptown, they shelve them all together, and I always make a beeline for that shelf the instant I set foot in the store.) On the table by my bed: “Byron: The Last Journey,” by Harold Nicolson; “Horse, Flower, Bird,” by Kate Bernheimer; Barry Paris’s biography of Louise Brooks; and “Rifleman: A Front-Line Life,” by Victor Gregg with Rick Stroud. I always have a comfort book going too, something I’ve read many times, and for me at the moment that comfort book is Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep.”

What’s the best book you’ve read so far this year?

I certainly haven’t enjoyed anything more than “The Unquiet Grave,” by Cyril Connolly, which I went back and reread sometime early this year. I’ve loved it since I was a teenager and like always to have it to hand; when I lived in France, years ago, it was one of only six books I carried with me — but because of its aphoristic nature, usually I only read bits and pieces of it, and it’s been many years since I read the whole thing start to finish.

Who are your favorite novelists?

The novelists I love best, the ones who made me want to become a writer, are mostly from the 19th century: Dickens, Melville, James, Conrad, Stevenson, Dostoyevsky, with Dickens probably coming first in that list. As far as 20th-century novelists go, I love Nabokov, Evelyn Waugh, Salinger, Fitzgerald, Don DeLillo; and of the 21st century, my two favorites so far are Edward St. Aubyn and Paul Murray.

What’s the best thing about writing a novel?

I love having an alternate life to retreat into and to lose myself in. I love being away from the world so long — so far out from shore. Eleven years.

The hardest?

Honestly, there are so many hard things about writing a novel that it’s hard to pick just one, but I particularly hate having to try to formulate an answer when someone asks me: What’s your book about?

What kinds of stories are you drawn to? Any you steer clear of?

I’m not very interested in contemporary American realism, or books about marriage, parenting, suburbia, divorce. Even as a child browsing at the library I distinctly remember avoiding books that had the big silver Caldecott award sticker on the front, because I loved fairy tales, ghost stories, adventures, whereas the Caldecott prize stories often had a dutiful tone that tended more towards social issues. Those things were not my cup of tea, even when I was small, and I knew it — although if something’s written well enough, anything goes. To paraphrase Nabokov: all I want from a book is the tingle down the spine, for my hairs to stand on end.

Do you ever read self-help? Anything you recommend?

I was a great fan of the now defunct Loompanics press, which published such self-help classics as “The Complete Guide to Lock Picking” and “How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found.”

What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?

See above.

How do you organize your own personal library?

Not very well, I’m afraid. But I know where everything is.

Do you keep books or give them away?

Keep them. But I give lots of books as gifts.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

I wouldn’t dream of requiring the president to read a book; he’s far too busy, and besides, I think we probably wouldn’t enjoy the same books.

Did you identify with any literary characters growing up? Who were your heroes?

As a child I adored Huckleberry Finn and Peter Pan. As a teenager: Franny Glass. In my 20s: Agatha Runcible.

If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be?

This to me is the most interesting question on the list, as it’s something I spend a great deal of time thinking about every day. Just because you love a writer’s books doesn’t necessarily mean they would be great company. I’d love to meet Oscar Wilde, because they all say he was so much more wonderful in person than on the page. From reading the journals of Tennessee Williams, I’m almost positive that if Tennessee and I had ever met, we would have been friends. And if it was a dinner date? Albert Camus. That trench coat! That cigarette! I think my French is good enough. We’d have a great time.

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t?

I don’t like Hemingway. And I know I don’t love “Ulysses” as much as I am supposed to — but then again, I never cared even one-tenth so much for the “Odyssey” as I do for the “Iliad.”

Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

Definitely I do, but impolitic to say.

If you could be any character from literature, who would you be?

This is a hard question, because so many great characters from literature come to bad ends. Mrs. Stitch, from “Scoop,” driving around madly in her tiny motorcar, looks like she’s having a lot of fun, though. So does Tom Ripley.

What book have you always meant to read and never gotten around to yet? What do you feel embarrassed never to have read?

I’m looking at Shelby Foote’s three-volume history of the Civil War on my shelf — somehow I’ve never managed to read the whole thing. And I’ve never read most of the novels of Thomas Hardy, although I don’t feel embarrassed about it. Even though I love a lot of his poetry, his novels are just too sad for me.

What will you read next?

“Lord Rochester’s Monkey,” by Graham Greene. And — now that it’s out — “Doctor Sleep,” by Stephen King.

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One more, one final, time with Donna Tartt... (Laydown date for The Goldfinch is tomorrow, ~15 hours from now.)
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October 20, 2013
Writer Brings in the World While She Keeps It at Bay
By Julie Bosman

Donna Tartt is the kind of writer who makes other writers, in the words of her fellow Southerner Scarlett O’Hara, pea green with envy.

She is so thoroughly well read that she is known to quote entire poems and passages from French novels at length in her slight Mississippi twang. In photos, she projects a ghostly mystery, her porcelain skin and black bob suggesting a cross between Anna Wintour and Oscar Wilde. And her self-confidence is so unshakable that it wouldn’t occur to her to fret that her novels, all three of them, only come out every decade or so.

Ms. Tartt, 49, is making a rare emergence from her writerly cocoon for the publication on Tuesday of “The Goldfinch,” perhaps the most anticipated book of the fall season, a 771-page bildungsroman that has been called dazzling, Dickensian and hypnotizing. She avoids most interviews and has zero desire to be a regular on the book-world circuit of panels, readings and award galas.

Arriving for lunch last week at a restaurant in Greenwich Village, Ms. Tartt shrugged off her tiny jacket and immediately lamented her discovery on the way over: the Barnes & Noble nearby had closed.

“I saw William S. Burroughs there once,” she said, sounding mournful, then jumped into a rat-a-tat history of the book business from before the Internet to the current age of e-books, recalling that when her first novel was published, it was typeset in the old-fashioned, pre-computerized way.

“It’s very weird,” she said. “The odd thing about it is that it’s so long between books for me that the publishing world changes completely every time I’m out, so it’s like I’ve never done it before.”

Ms. Tartt became an instant celebrity with the publication of “The Secret History,” her 1992 novel about a pack of murderous classics scholars at a private college in New England. The book has sold more than five million copies and has been translated into dozens of languages.

It was about two weeks before the publication of that novel that she became spooked by all the attention. The release was accompanied by a profile in Vanity Fair proclaiming that Ms. Tartt was “going to be famous very soon — conceivably the moment you read this.”

“I learned pretty early on that I wasn’t cut out for sort of the public, literary....” she said, her voice trailing off, and her light green eyes darting to the side. “Too much noise, too much hubbub, too much.”

To her relief, the publicity subsided, and Ms. Tartt went back to her writing, rarely granting interviews or discussing her private life. (For the record, she is unmarried, has no children, and divides her time between Manhattan and the Virginia countryside.) Ten years after “The Secret History,” Ms. Tartt and her publisher, Knopf, released “The Little Friend,” a story set in the South that received much less enthusiastic reviews but still sold briskly.

She got back to work on a new novel that had its beginnings during trips to Amsterdam more than 20 years ago. Ms. Tartt is a lifelong keeper of notebooks, and some of the earliest scenes in “The Goldfinch” were taken from notes dated 1993. “I was writing for a while not knowing what I was writing,” she said. “That’s the way it’s been with all my books. Things will come to you and you’re not going to know exactly how they fit in. You have to trust in the way they all fit together, that your subconscious knows what you’re doing.”

The book was centered on a 1654 painting by the Dutch artist Carel Fabritius — the “Goldfinch” — that Ms. Tartt, speaking with the authority of an art historian, said is the “missing link” between Rembrandt and Vermeer.

Much of Ms. Tartt’s research and writing took place in the marble-and-wood-paneled Allen Room at the New York Public Library’s flagship building on Fifth Avenue, where she worked regularly in the mornings, writing with plain ballpoint pens in spiral-bound notebooks. She kept potential distractions to a minimum; Ms. Tartt isn’t on Twitter and said that if she uses the Internet at all, it’s usually to find a restaurant address.

A trip to Las Vegas that she initially resisted — “It’s a long story,” she said — gave her the realization that much of the novel should be set there, a decision that gave the book its sweep that went beyond New York and Amsterdam.

The book, which took more than 10 years to write, is narrated by Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New York boy whose world is violently disrupted during a routine visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his much-adored mother. A terrorist bomb explodes, killing Theo’s mother and other innocents, including a man who, just before dying, implores Theo to take “The Goldfinch” out of the smoking wreckage of the museum.

For nearly 800 pages, the book asks deep questions: whether it is possible to be good, what part love plays in our behavior and what in life is true and lasting. Writing in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani said that the novel “pulls together all her remarkable storytelling talents into a rapturous, symphonic whole and reminds the reader of the immersive, stay-up-all-night pleasures of reading.”

Michael Pietsch, her editor at Little, Brown & Company who is now the chief executive of Hachette Book Group, its parent company, said: “I can’t think of another writer who invents every character and every setting from so entirely within the characters and within the place. You never doubt for a second that you’re experiencing something real.”

The Dickensian sweep of “The Goldfinch” has its roots in Ms. Tartt’s childhood in Grenada, Miss., where she began writing and drawing her own books when she was 5 years old. Taking copies of National Geographic, she would cut out pictures of a zebra or a child, and write a story about the picture. “I wrote books in this way, around images,” Ms. Tartt said, something that didn’t occur to her until “The Goldfinch” — a book that surrounds an image of a luminous yellow-tinged bird — was complete.

As a teenager, she worked at the local library and read nearly everything in it, devouring 19th-century novels in earnest. “I read so much Dickens when I was a kid growing up that those books are more inside me now than they are outside me,” Ms. Tartt said.

With the publication of “The Goldfinch” only days away, Ms. Tartt was getting ready, somewhat reluctantly and while fighting a cold, for all its accompaniments: a book party, a 12-city book tour that would take her from Nashville to Edinburgh. By sheer coincidence, on Tuesday, her publication date, an exhibition of paintings by Dutch masters will begin at the Frick Collection in Manhattan. “The Goldfinch” is among them. (A spokeswoman for the Frick said the exhibition was planned without knowledge of Ms. Tartt’s book.)

“My Dutch publisher called me and said, ‘You’re never going to believe this,’” Ms. Tartt said. “It’s really kind of strange. It was very moving to me in a weird way. Just to make sure I got the point, it wasn’t the approximate date. It was the exact date.”

a rare interview...


http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50159126n