What is Jon Keller reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Jon Keller, author of the novel, Of Sea and Cloud.

His entry begins:

I recently moved out of my house and onto a sailboat, so the books I’m able to have around have been drastically reduced. One week aboard and I’m already missing some—last night, it was Homer that I was missing.

Although I’m a fiction writer, most of the two dozen books that made the cut are poetry—Wright, Yeats, Neruda, Wordsworth, Ikkyu…

On the fiction to-read list are: David Copperfield, The Son, The Plover, and Forest of Fortune.

Notable among the non-fiction is the Autobiography of Mark Twain.

For several years now, I’ve had two books that I consistently go back to. The Stephen Mitchell edition of Song of Myself, and...[read on]

About Of Sea and Cloud, from the publisher:

Nicolas Graves raised his sons to be lobstermen. Bill and Joshua (known as Jonah) Graves grew up aboard their father’s boat—the Cinderella—learning the rules and rites of the antiquated business they love. But when their father is lost at sea and the price of lobster crashes worldwide, Bill and Jonah must decide how much they are willing to risk for their family legacy.

Standing against them is Osmond Raymond— former Calvinist minister, mystic, captain of the Sanctity, and their father’s business partner for more than twenty years. Together with his grandson and heir, Julius, Osmond is determined to push the Graves family out of their lobster pound, regardless of the cost or the consequences.

In the tradition of Russell Banks’ Affliction, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News or Philipp Meyer’s The Son, Of Sea and Cloud is a powerful, haunting novel that, with extraordinary depth and compassion, explores the relationships between fathers and sons, tradition and change, and the surprising ways in which globalization is affecting some of the most isolated harbors on this planet.

Visit Jon Keller's website.

Writers Read: Jon Keller.

--Marshal Zeringue