Rebecca Scherm’s debut novel is Unbecoming, published by Viking. Scherm holds an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan, where she currently teaches. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Jezebel, Subtropics, The Hairpin, Hobart, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and Fiction Writers Review.Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Scherm's reply:
Right now I’m reading Almost Famous Women, Megan Mahew Bergman’s new collection. I bought it last night when I got the time of a friend’s reading wrong and arrived at the bookstoreVisit Rebecca Scherm's website.more than an hour early. What was there to do but curl up with a new book? Bergman’s stories are simultaneously grounded and strange, delicate and frank. Her work reminds me of Elizabeth McCracken. When other people began to arrive and I had to put the book away, I had that fiction jet lag, when you reappear in the real world and aren’t quite sure where or who you are.
Because my book is just out and it’s an exciting time (a little too) exciting for me, I’ve been rereading: Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, which I sometimes think I know by heart, and Dashiell Hammett.Hammett is strange comfort food, I know, but it works for me.
Over the holidays I read Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on The Train, which was just delicious. I always read dark or violent books over Christmas, and I don’t want to think too deeply about why that is. I read Lolita on Christmas day many years ago, and I remember that as a very good Christmas.
--Marshal Zeringue
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