The Book Review: Writers’ dream dinner parties

July 26, 2024

An illustration of Stephen Graham Jones shows a middle-aged Native American man with long gray hair, shaved closely above his ears, wearing a blue T-shirt.

Rebecca Clarke

Dear fellow readers,

I’m a big fan of our “By the Book” feature, a weekly interview with a writer, musician, editor or other book lover (my all-time favorite is the one my colleague Greg Cowles did with the filmmaker Ken Burns). No matter who we talk to, some of the questions recur from week to week: What books are on your night stand? You’re throwing a literary dinner party — what three people, living or dead, do you invite?

Not everyone loves this question. “I can’t imagine myself hosting a literary dinner party,” the novelist Anne Tyler told us in 2015. “What on earth would a bunch of writers talk about? I’d rather just curl up with a sandwich and read some favorite book over again on my own.” (When we tallied the dream dinner-party picks in 2022, we found that the most sought-after guests were Shakespeare, James Baldwin, Mark Twain, Toni Morrison and Jane Austen — though the novelist Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney asked, “What do dead writers eat? Can they eat? Will Jane Austen want leg of mutton?”)

Our most recent By the Book subject, the horror novelist Stephen Graham Jones, had an especially delightful answer to the dinner party question: Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler and “whoever wrote ‘Beowulf,’” he told our editor Scott Heller. “And of course we’re at Red Lobster or Applebee’s, in a corner booth. Might have to teach the ‘Beowulf’ poet about napkins. But maybe the ‘Beowulf’ poet teaches me how a fork fits in an eye socket.”

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Tina Jordan
Deputy Editor, The New York Times Book Review

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