What is Bradford Morrow reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Bradford Morrow, author of The Diviner’s Tale.

His entry begins:

My reading at the moment is all over the map, but here goes. Two wildly imaginative first novels that are just now being published and which really impressed me are Karen Russell's Swamplandia! and Benjamin Hale's The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore. In a way, they're both bildungsromans--one about young, motherless, brave Ava Bigtree growing up in a world filled with ghosts, gators, and grief; the other a memoir by the world's first talking chimpanzee, a riotous and eloquent recounting of his intellectual, psychological, sexual maturation in a human universe that just doesn't know how to deal with him. Both writers are in their twenties, and both are masterful storytellers with astonishing gifts for language that crackles with energy, is richly metaphoric, and honed to razor-sharpness. Their debut novels are...[read on]

Among the early praise for The Diviner’s Tale:

“In his sublime new novel The Diviner’s Tale, Bradford Morrow accomplishes the deep, subtle miracle I have been waiting and waiting for someone to effect—he gives us the first novel-length work of fiction that actually does create a seamless breathing breathtaking unity of the literary and the suspense novel. This novel detonates the very notion of genre. And it works because it is riveting, insightful, sentence by sentence charged with feeling, as it bears us helpless with it on its downward journey to illumination.”
—Peter Straub

“Bradford Morrow, like the diviner-heroine of The Diviner’s Tale, is a mesmerizing storyteller who casts an irresistible spell. He has constructed an ingeniously plotted mystery story that is at the same time a love story—luminous and magical, fraught with suspense, beautifully and subtly rendered—a feat of prose divination.”
—Joyce Carol Oates

Learn more about the book and author at Bradford Morrow's website.

Bradford Morrow is the author of numerous acclaimed works of fiction and poetry, including Ariel's Crossing and Giovanni's Gift. He is also the founder of the literary magazine Conjunctions, which he has edited since 1981. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2007 and is a professor of literature at Bard University.

Writers Read: Bradford Morrow.

--Marshal Zeringue