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the book report

Adam Gopnik.

Adam Gopnik is a New Yorker staff writer whose books include Paris to the Moon, Through the Children's Gate and The Table Comes First. In 2011, he delivered the Massey Lecture, Winter: Five Windows on the Season. Gopnik, who was raised in Montreal, recently published a memoir, At the Strangers' Gate: Arrivals in New York.

Why did you write your new book?

Apart from the obvious outer reasons, of which writers should not be ashamed – advances and sales and imagined royalties – I wrote it for two inner ones. First, because I thought that the story of a young couple from Canada arriving as strangers in New York and struggling to become citizens had some alchemical universality: Another hundred people just got off the bus this minute in New York, as Stephen Sondheim writes, and that bus runs as readily to Paris and London and Toronto and doubtless Mumbai and Bangkok as it does to Manhattan. That pilgrimage of arrival, or willed transformation, seems a big enough subject to transcend the vanity of the memoirist – though the vanity of the memoirist remembering particularly poignant years in his life is, in this instance, pretty big. And then the eighties suddenly seemed an epoch, a period, a time apart, not just a vestibule to this one. They did things differently there and I wanted to write about those differences.

Whose sentences are your favourite?

I am a sentence-fetishist – an epigram-monger, at times even an aphorist-hoarder – probably at the expense of my ability to write narrative at length. A little like a pitcher who has been throwing knuckleballs for so long that his arm is bent permanently out of shape. (And then I wonder: Do they still throw knuckleballs?) John Updike, of course, was the master carpenter of our time, always mingling high speech and low cunning, brains and groins, seamlessly in a single phrase. I suspect his imprint, for good or ill, is all over my new book as it was over my older ones. (And, in turn, as Nabokov's was all over his.) Joseph Mitchell, his polar opposite as a stylist, nothing but observations connected by ands, is another sentence maker I admire, and his definition of good writing, included in this book – that it seeks "a wild exactitude" – seems to me unimprovable.

What's the best advice you've ever received?

I quote my father as saying, on our departure for New York: "Never underestimate the other person's insecurities." In truth, he said this to me often when I was young, not just then, but it is infallible advice.

Which book do you think is underappreciated?

Of my own? Well, all? Oh, you mean by some other author. Oh. Well, a quick homecoming thought makes me want to praise Mordecai Richler's Solomon Gursky Was Here as the greatest, and still not adequately appreciated, of all Canadian novels.

Which book got you through the darkest period of your life?

Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson sits perpetually by my bedside and I can usually find a quote or a scene within it to lift my spirits even when I am discouraged and demoralized, which is more often than I might admit.

Which books have you reread most in your life?

He's become almost unduly fashionable, but P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves novels and, even more, his Jeeves and Bertie short stories – more specifically, the ones he wrote in the 1930s and 40s; like all writers, even Wodehouse had his prime period – seem inexhaustible. That he wrote these comic masterpieces in the darkest of human hours, which he managed to blunder into first-hand during the Second World War, should force our professors to think more handily than they like to about the actual relations of life and art.

What's the best romance in literature?

It marks me as a permanent adolescent, I suppose, but the love of Aragorn and Arwen, mortal and elf-maiden, in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, never fails to move me. (As well as that of Faramir and Eowyn in the same book.)

What's your favourite bookstore in the world?

God knows it used to be Nicholas Hoare in Montreal, where I would wander for hours catching up on British books. Nowadays, I suppose I have to be more cosmopolitan, and admit that it is in London itself, at John Sandoe, at Heywood Hill and at Daunt Books, that I still find the utter thrill of possibility – the wardrobe with Narnia inside – that marks a great bookstore.

Actor and author Chris Colfer says he held onto the film rights to his fantasy series The Land of Stories until he was sure it would be “done right.” The former Glee star is set to write and direct a movie adaptation.

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