BEST AUTHOR BEST : PATRICIA LOCKWOOD [2]

.-  WHAT'S the last great book you read?

Roger Shattuck's '' The Forbidden Experiment,'' about the wild boy of Aveyron [ Improbably gave me the structure for a poem I was writing called '' Party in the USA.'' ] Also Leslie Marmon Silko's '' Ceremony.''

.-  Describe your ideal reading experience [ when, where, what, how ].

OK it's the morning, so the light is just that flat slap of total clarity on the page, and I have coffee, and my phone is just out of reach of my fingertips, and Miette is on my lap, disproving the claim that cats can't sweat.

As to the what : anything in real print, anything on paper. Also, here's something I'm going to ask God for someday; a way to eat while reading without having to mechanically raise the food to my mouth.

A pulley system, or crumbs brought to me by little doves, or something.

.-  Do you count any books as guilty pleasures?

I really cherish those problem books from the '70s and '80s, where it's like you've got scoliosis, or your friend ran you over with their car and you can't tell anyone, or you're psychic and have purple eyes and it's too much responsibility.

'' Steffie Can't Come Out to Play '' is the probable apotheosis of these. A teen runaway, in gritty '70s New York, falls into the clutches of an evil pimp named Favor who only eats steak.

His clothes are described in incredible detail. She escapes evèntually, but not before pretty much all of her family has died.

.-  Have you read any John Updike since writing your much-discussed London Review of Books piece on his work?

Of course. '' The Witches of Eastwick '' is a perennial fall read, and I can go back and graze on the short stories anytime I remember them, like potato chips.

The discouraging thing about writing criticism sometimes is the response : Now I never have to read anything by this person.

With relief, understandably, since there is so much reading to be done. But I don't write about writers who aren't worth my attention. I've never done it yet.

.-  You've mentioned that you were working on a historical fantasy novel. Say more.

NO.

.-  What's the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

I was reading Ange Minko's '' Difficult Ornaments '' in Key West, and she sets forth a theory that the bight referred to in Elizabeth Bishop's great poem '' The Bight '' was actually Garrison Bight. 

It's older, more dilapidated, cheerfully disreputable, rather than the more picturesque one that most readers have linked to the poem. That's the sort of thing I like.

.-  What's the last book you recommended to a member of your family?

My sister asked for a book in which terrible things happen to people - worse things, she clarified, unimaginable things. So I recommended '' In the Eye of the Wild,'' where a bear tears off a woman's face.

.-  You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

This question stresses me out so bad because what are we serving for food? Obviously I'm only inviting dead people, but is this a situation where they enter the full flower of life again for one evening, or is the casserole going to fall through them into the chair?

In any event, I do want Sappho. She gets to finish, and whatever falls out of her butt, I'm interested.

The World Students Society thanks The New York Times.