Criticism & Features

NBCC Reads

What Are You Recommending, John Casey?

By John Casey

LAST week, the NBCC launched a Best Recommended List, drawn from the votes of our members and over a hundred former finalists and winners of our award. (For more on that go here). One of the voters was National Book Award winning novelist, John Casey. Here's what he had to say about his vote for Per Petterson's “Out Stealing Horses”:

What is wonderful about this novel is that the narrator can feel the Norwegian landscape she grew up in and what happened there — he feels it as intimately as a blind man reading braille or touching the face of his wife to feel her expression.

John Casey was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and the University of Iowa. His novel, Spartina, won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle prize. He lives with his wife in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he is Professor of English Literature at the University of Virginia.