A Man In The Cafe Asked Julie Otsuka What She Was Reading. Outputs

What is your favorite book that no one has heard of?

“Suicide” by the French writer Edouard Levé. This book opened a small hole in my heart. Narrated with the voice of “you” and addressed to a friend who committed suicide 20 years ago, the novel is both a meditation on the life of the deceased friend and the act of suicide, and a farewell note from the author who committed suicide. 10 days after handing over the manuscript to his own life, his old self and us the reader. With the little, obsessive details coming together, “you” slowly emerges as a brooding, lonely, troubled man who can’t stand to be in the world anymore. The language is beautiful and plain, deceptively simple, meticulously precise. I’ve never read anything like this. It can be said that this is the ultimate work of autofiction.

Writers working today – novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets – which do you admire most?

I’ll be reading all about Rachel Cusk, who has done some of the most interesting work by any writer around, and Katie Kitamura, whose latest novel, “Intimacies,” is both stylishly gorgeous and psychologically frustrating. She is an absolutely excellent writer. Other authors whose work I admire: Colson Whitehead, Mohsin Hamid, Jamaica Kincaid, David Szalay and Deborah Levy, especially the “Living Autobiography” trilogy. For the pure creativity of form, short stories by David Means. I would do anything to read a new short story by Julie Hecht, which was voted funniest writer. I am very interested in the plays of Will Eno, the master of the deep and absurd. Also the work of Wallace Shawn. For thoughtful comments on race: Claudia Rankine, Cathy Park Hong, Ta-Nehisi Coates. And the wonderful irreverent journalist Jay Caspian Kang, who tells it all as it is.

Do you count any books as guilty pleasures?

I’m currently reading one – “Anomaly” by French author Hervé Le Tellier, about a mysterious plane flight whose passengers seem to exist in two different realities. Very “Black Mirror”. I’m not sure what makes a book a guilty pleasure, but you definitely get that when reading a book.

Which writers are particularly good at mother-daughter relationships?

No one describes the passionate bond between mothers and daughters more brutally or more frankly, intelligently, and stylistically in Vivian Gornick’s memoir “The Heavy Ties.”