Book Date No. 13

A trip to Terrace Books with editor Ezra Kupor.

Somehow it’s been two years since Homebodies came out. To celebrate I took my book editor, Ezra Kupor on a date to Terrace Books in Windsor Terrace, which might have sneakily become a new favorite. Ezra also writes the witty and funny newsletter Galley Brag, where he interviews publishing insiders about their literary takes and asks the kind of industry-specific questions that a nosy Nancy like me is very interested in. Read about our date, below.

Can you state your name for the record?

Ezra Kupor.

What do you do?

I am an editor at HarperCollins. I'm also your editor.

Where are you from?

I'm from Atlanta. I was born in Houston, Texas. Most of my family still lives there, extended family, but my parents are still in Atlanta and that's mostly where I grew up.

Why this bookstore?

I used to live in Windsor Terrace. It was deep, deep, deep pandemic. This bookstore used to be on Prospect Park West. It was perfect because I would order books for pickup. I could still have the bookstore experience and not actively be inside. It moved to this other place and I wanted to check it out.

How many books did you read last year?

I think last year was my worst year ever. I read 17 books, but that does not count what I read for work. And I got top surgery, so I did spend most of it watching TV.

Absolutely fair. What book really stood out?

Rejection slapped. I'm so not original in that, but I am so burned by story collections that I feel like I don't even want to open one. Being an editor, I’m thinking what's going to be the weakest link? But that was one where I was consistently blown away. I am also a Gretchen Felker-Martin stan, so I read Cuckoo. I will read everything she writes. I don't think anyone's doing it like her. She's a trans horror writer. Her first book was called Manhunt, which was insane. It's really gory. It's basically this future where if you are a man, you turn into a feral zombie creature. It takes place in the apocalypse. All that has already happened, but it's these trans girls who are trying to get enough hormones so that their testosterone levels don't rise to where they turn into a monstrous creature. The women in charge are an evil army of TERFs who believe trans women should not exist because they are so close to becoming monsters and ate not real women. All the rich white women live in underground bunkers. It talks about social issues in an interesting way while still being bloody and propulsive.

Cuckoo is about this crazy conversion therapy camp and this ragtag group of people that band together. It goes between the present time and the future. A lot of them are obviously so deeply fucked up and they're trying to hunt down these other conversion therapy camps that they think have the same sort of sinister undertone and save those kids. I'm always trying to read more horror that's smart and interesting.

What's the first book you read this year?

Charlotte Shane's An Honest Woman. It’s really small trim. My friend gave me the galley. I never read books about heterosexuality, but she writes about sex work and her relationship with men in a way that's really thoughtful and interesting and not sensationalized. If someone pitched me this book I would probably say I’ve seen too many of these projects but because it’s her it felt new on the page.

What are you reading right now?

I just finished reading Sabrina Imbler’s, How Far the Light Reaches and loved it. I'm reading Doppelganger on and off, which I really love, and then I'm just reading submissions. Now that it's nice outside, I'm really excited to read one of these books. I have been trying to listen to a lot of audiobooks, but things are so bad right now I try to make myself so dumb. I listen to whatever brain dead podcast that's making me stupider. But I've actually read nine books this year already, which I’m proud of myself for. I loved Woodworking. I read How to Sleep At Night. I also read My Best Friend's Honeymoon, which is lesbian smut. The main character is always doing whatever people want her to do and the friend is like we can do whatever you want but you have to ask for it.

Oh!

Their other book, Cleat Cute, is about soccer. I'm not really into sports romance. Their book, Mistakes Were Made is such a crazy book. I’ve lent it to so many people. Basically this girl is a a senior in college and she's at some random gay bar far from her town and ends up picking up this hot older woman. They fuck in the car and it's automatically messy, messy, messy, messy. Of course the next morning she's like, oh, I'm going to brunch with my best friend at college and her mom…

Yikes.

And they're keeping it from the daughter slash friend and have this sort of long distance thing. Honestly, I don't think this should be allowed, but I guess everyone's 18.

How did you become a reader though? Were you a child reader?

I was such a reader. I was so bad at directions because I would just read in the car all the time. I would be the kid reading in the corner of the gym during one of my sister's volleyball games and get hit in the head. Most of the pictures of me as a kid are of me reading and either someone's trying to talk to me or actually I'm in danger. I used to be really into reading while I was walking.

That feels dangerous.

When I worked in Chicago, my job was in a more residential area, so it was far from the train. It was a 20 minute walk so I would read.

As you walked.

As I walked. Get hit by a car, whatever, I’m chilling. I like to read outside, on public transit. I can’t read in my house. If I'm home, I could water my plants, I could clean, I could do so many things. I'm not sitting my ass down reading.

But I was a big reader. It's good that I didn't discover what fanfiction was because I was writing little novels in my house and they were fully just Harry Potter, but I thought I invented it. I wrote this book called Secrets that was 40 pages long. It was just Harry Potter fanfiction, but I was like, no one's ever thought about this before. I dunno if I ever told you this, but I was kind of hired as a music blogger when I was 12, 13.

Who were you blogging for?

It doesn’t exist anymore but it was a music reviewing website. I wrote a lot of political blogs when I was in elementary school. They kept taking it down. I was saying things like, George W. Bush needs to go to prison. War is so horrible. My mom was like, You literally have to stop doing this or they're going to kick you out. And I was like, Of the country? And she was like, no your elementary school.

You were forecasting.

Literally, God. I was so…you can’t shut me up.

First amendment babe.

Exactly. Well… Then I was going into middle school that summer and I wrote this thing, I wrote this blog. I was so obsessed with The Beatles. I sat in my backyard and listened to this one Beatles song A Day In The Life on repeat for hours and hours and then wrote a deep analysis. It ended up getting around to a friend of a friend who was like do you want to review music for my website as kind of a joke? It was so fucking nerdy. My partner is like I cannot believe you were not bullied as a child. I was such a precocious kid. I was writing things like, “The songs of childhood are growing fainter every day and I can't even hear it anymore, then I put the record on and I feel alive again.” It's truly the most self serious shit ever. People in the comments were like, this girl is not 12. I wrote five or six reviews and Jam Bio was like, okay, maybe we can talk to your parents about you doing this. I told them seventh grade is supposed to be really hard. I actually don't think I can. I really need to focus on my studies.

You could have been Tavi Gevinson.

Literally.

Did you have favorite books as a kid?

I was a science fiction nerd. I read all the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books. I read Harry Potter, but in a way where I was like, this is just a ruse and witches are real, but Harry Potter is not real. They're trying to throw them off with this. I was reading nonfiction history books about witches so I thought they were trying to cover things up.

Did you think J.K. Rowling was a witch?

No, I thought she was a poser, which she is. Harry Potter was a red herring. Misinformation. I was obsessed with Dave Eggers. I read his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius when I was way too young. Then I subscribed to Mcsweeney’s because he ran it. That was my Hanukkah gift every year. That's kind of how I got into publishing because I was obsessed with him and obsessed with his literacy nonprofit 826. It started in San Francisco. Because of the property where the building was there needed to be a commercial storefront, so the front is a bookstore and pirate shop and the back is free creative writing classes for kids. When I was in college, I interned at 826 Chicago, which was a spy store and bookstore. I worked in the bookstore and then also was editing the student publications and also teaching creative writing workshops and they were really so creative and smart and funny. I almost went into teaching. Then I met Dave Eggers and I was like, I read your book when I was 12, and he was like, That's not good. That was too young. There's definitely a lot of sex and drugs in that book. I thought this is what it was like in the nineties in San Francisco.

You said, this is not a ruse.

Exactly.

Where do you get your reading recommendations?

Now that I do Galley Brag I get them from influencers and booksellers. I feel like I can find more hidden gems. I have a coworker that works part-time at Book Culture on the Upper West Side and used to work there full time. Sometimes she'll bring in galleys. Because of publishing I read books on submission or I’ll read a book a friend has edited, but it’s hard to find a peer recommendation that’s not influenced by some person's job or my perception of an author. When I lived in Chicago I would go to the library, especially when it was a nice day, get 10 books and go across the street to the park and then just read the first few pages. Then I would read one or two in a sitting.

How would you describe your literary taste?

It depends. Me as an editor versus me as a reader. As an editor I came up with this thesis: I’m fascinated by the universal human experience of what is life, how do I fit into this world? Who am I? What does it mean to be human? And I am interested by all these contradictions of identity and external pressures that sort of force someone to make a decision about who they are in the world. So that does mean that I’m more interested in queer authors and non-white authors or authors that aren't born and raised in the US. Any sort of contradictions of identity that add extra pressures to that question or complicate it, but also complicated family structures, complicated friendship, relationships. Anything where there's pressure being put on those questions of identity. I'm interested in that throughout different genres.

As a reader it changes. Across the board, in my editorial work and in my reading, I cannot do too cool for school. I can't do girl walks around, or there's a character that's cold or distant or closed off from themselves. I need tenderness, I need heart. I need to feel something. Even if I don't agree with what the character is doing, I need some yearning or desire to live. There has to be stakes. If you don't care about your life, if you don't care about anyone else and you're just walking around and you're like, oh, nothing matters. That nihilism, I can't.