Nini Berndt’s Recommended Reading List
Photograph of Nini Berndt by Kyla Fear
To celebrate Nini Berndt’s newly released first novel from Tin House, There Are Reasons for This, we dived into her recommended reading list.
Nini Berndt is a graduate of the University of Florida's MFA program in Fiction and teaches writing at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, where she lives with her wife and son.
To learn more about Nini and her inspiring career, visit here.
“This is a magic trick of a book, the sort of perfection you can only hope to emulate, the sort of skill you can't help but revere, sitting awestruck and lucky to know there is writing like this in the world. There isn't a word out of place—the prose is so precise, the psychology so intricate, the tension so tightly wound. My mouth hung open for the last 30 pages of this book, and I will be thinking about it and revisiting it for a very long time.”
“A slim novel is a masterclass in building unease, the sort of subtle, pervasive, bone-settling disquiet that lingers long after you put it down. The comparisons to Shirley Jackson (an all-time favorite of mine) are warranted, the best of her social commentary and careful observations, but sparser, more intimate. I am awed by this book.”
“I don't know another book that so directly confronts the problem of our own relativity, the competing narratives of our own lives. An intentional revision of a memoir and story she'd written her whole life—her marriage to her much older art teacher—Ciment allows, when so little in our world does right now, for many things to be true at once. It resists all essentialism, and asks if someone can be both your soulmate and a predator, and the answer is, remarkably, heartbreakingly, yes.”
“These stories unmoored me in the best possible way. They wound through me, the voice and structure of each story perfectly calibrated, taut and provocative and sly and disarming. It achieved what to me is the highest calling of art: how to contend with the problem and gift of being alive.”
“I've reread this book more times than I can count, and I keep coming back to it because every page is so rich, each line so deliberate, the interior so nuanced, the simplicity of the tension so propulsive. It achieves such a pronounced complexity, such a heightened pitch, all put in motion by the banality of a cat bite. What I've admired most in Fox though is the authority of her prose, her ability to say with a confidence boarding defiance, something true.”
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