On My Nightstand

Sunday, January 08, 2006

Mark Rotella, an Italian-American, is the author of "Stolen Figs and Other Adventures in Calabria," a travelogue and memoir of returning to Italy with his father. He is presently working on a book on Italian-American crooners. Rotella spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from his home in Jersey City.

What have you been reading?
I'm teaching a course on creative nonfiction at Lehman College in the Bronx. I wanted my students to read the great old "New Journalists" from the 1960s, so I'm having them read "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" by Joan Didion. Over the last few years, I have fallen in love with Los Angeles, so it's wonderful to read Didion's writing on the city. Her prose is spare and brilliant. She talks around subjects before she eventually gets to them. What got me was that Didion writes in vignettes, little stories that add up to one larger piece.

I've been reading Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood." You read the book now and you may forget how big it was and how it changed literature decades ago. Capote makes the prose seem so effortless. He told his story using fictional elements. There was this tension in the narrative. You knew who the killers were, but he held back the motive until the end.

I also read Gay Talese's "The Bridge," which was wonderful. It was Talese's first book, and it was a short nonfiction work about the building of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge (between Staten Island and Brooklyn). Talese spends a lot of time with people and really gets their story. What he does with "The Bridge" is show how building the Verrazano changed New York City. He covered how bridges were made and the lives of the workers. His descriptions are amazing.

I also read Greil Marcus' "Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock'N' Roll Music" for the first time. I was surprised by his selection of Randy Newman as one of the great innovators of modern music. Marcus' writing is really rich. I don't read him straight through. I read one chapter at a time and go on to something else.