Famous Authors' Guilty Pleasures

Alan Furst

My guilty pleasure this summer will be to sit on my screened porch and read New Yorker writers of the past: A.J. Liebling's The Road Back to Paris, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris and The Honest Rainmaker. And Joe Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel and others. Liebling wrote about boxing, food, rogues and war, all of which I like to read about. But what I'm really after this summer is the pleasure of sophisticated city life, New York and Paris, seen from the distance of a summer dusk in a Long Island village, cicadas going full blast. If I were actually in a city, I'd probably sit by the air conditioner and read English country novels.

Furst's latest book, The Spies of Warsaw, came out in June