BEST AUTHOR BEST : THOMAS McGUANE [ 2 ]

.-  HOW have your reading tastes changed over time?

It's been a process of learning what they are. I look for the subjective pulse of the author, of the kind I feel in Hamsun, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Turgenev.

In much contemporary literary fiction, that's often replaced by ingenuity. I'd be a terrible postmodernist : I'm not interested in ingenuity.

.-  Do you count any books as guilty pleasures?

I read too many fishing and birding books. The books have the guileless charm of club-notes.

.-  Do you think any canonical books are widely misunderstood?

Probably '' Lolita,'' I find the glorious writing under its cynicism disturbing. The '' good '' Nabokov of '' Pnin '' and '' Speak, Memory '' appeals to me more. The smirking Nabokov is tiresome.

.- Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine?

Let's start with the two protagonists of L.P. Hartley's '' Eustace and Hilda,'' Then Gogol's Chichikov,  Dickens Mr. Pickwick and Cervantes's. Don Quixote of Part II.

,-  What's your favorite book no one else has heard of ?

'' Uttermost Part of the Earth,'' by E. Lucas Bridges, is the memoir of a man born to English missionaries in Tierra del Fuego - a vast land, lightly touched by Europeans, at a time before many of its animals and most of its indigenous people went extinct.

These animals and people live again in its pages.

.-  If you could require Montana's governor to read one book, what would it be?

Charles Darwin, ''On the Origin of Species.'' Breaking news no dinosaurs aboard Noah's Ark.

.-  If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

Harry G. Frankfurt, '' On Bullshit.''

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

Italo Svevo, Mark Twain, Machado de Assis. Lots of laughter, troubled gazes, leftovers.

The World Students Society thanks The New York Times.