Alan Brennert

Alan Brennert is the author of Honolulu and Moloka’i, which was a 2006-2007 BookSense Reading Group Pick and won the 2006 Bookies Award, sponsored by the Contra Costa Library, for the Book Club Book of the Year. In addition to novels, he has written short stories, teleplays, screenplays, and the libretto of a stage musical, Weird Romance. He won an Emmy Award and a People’s Choice Award for his work as a writer-producer on the television series L.A. Law, and he has been nominated for a Golden Globe Award and for the Writers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Teleplay of the Year. His story “MaQui” won a Nebula Award. His new novel is Palisades Park.

Not so long ago I asked Brennert about what he was reading.  His reply:

I read a lot of nonfiction as research for my books, but when I want to read nonfiction for pleasure I am never disappointed by the work of Marion Meade. Her most recent book is Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney, which as a longtime fan of West’s work I devoured in several sittings. I think it’s the best biography of West I’ve read, and McKenney’s life (she inspired her sister’s book and play My Sister Eileen) is equally fascinating; their tragic end was a heartbreaking loss of talent. Meade is also the author of the fine biography Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This? and the wonderful multi-subject biography Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties, which expertly interweaves the burgeoning careers of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Edna Ferber in the 1920s. As a writer I’m always fascinated by the lives of other writers, and no one conveys the writer’s life better than Meade.

Visit Alan Brennert's website.

--Marshal Zeringue