First the short, official biography: Nicholas Christopher is the author of fourteen books: five novels, most recently The Bestiary, published in July by the Dial Press; eight volumes of poetry, including Crossing the Equator: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2004; and a nonfiction book, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir & the American City. The Bestiary will come out in paperback in June, along with a new edition of Christopher's second novel, Veronica.

I pretty much gushed about Nicholas during my 12th Day of Christmas postings. He is one of my favorite writers and I'm always impressed by the way he blends fact and fiction into his books - intricately working so many different people and interests into one over-arching narrative thread. My mind goes in dozens of different directions when I read his work and I find them to be the perfect stories for endlessly curious readers. There's no one else like him and I reread his books over and over again.

You can read more about The Bestiary at his site, where he provides an enormous amount of background on writing this novel and bestiaries in general. Here's a bit:

Among the “real� bestiary hunters I read about, or whose works I found of interest, are: Conrad Gesner, a 16th century animal encyclopedist who dedicated his life to tracking down rare bestiaries. Sir Thomas Browne, who catalogued fantastical beasts in 17th-century England, using a dazzling array of sources. In the 19th century there was Thomas Wright; Charles Cahier, who searched for bestiaries in a dozen European countries between 1847 and 1877; and E.P. Evans, who made spectacular finds at the end of the century in the illicit networks of the antiquarian book underground that flourished in Britain. The closest predecessors to my hero are all from the 20th century: M.R. James, who employed modern bibliographic detection techniques to search ecclesiastical and monastic libraries along the ancient Amber Route, from Wales to North Africa; P. Ansell Robin, who constructed his Zoological Pedigree in 1932, charting all known bestiaries from ancient times on; and G.C. Druce, who between 1908 and 1937 scoured university vaults, discovering a host of forgotten and uncataloged illuminated volumes.

Now onto Nicholas's thoughts on some good reading in 2007:

An amazing novel that I discovered this year is The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, by Jan Potocki. Written around 1800, it is a gorgeously wrought labyrinth of stories within stories -- replete with vampires, renegade Cabbalists, gypsy chieftans, and geometers -- that echoes The Decameron and The 1001 Nights and is a precursor of every surreal novel of the 20th century.

I've read all Charles Nicholl's books and can't say enough about them. His specialty is works of historical detection: the murder of Christopher Marlowe, Ralegh's ill-fated search for El Dorado in the Amazon basin. The book I read this fall, Somebody Else, traces Arthur Rimbaud's years of exile in East Africa, as a coffee trader and gunrunner, leading enormous caravans across some of the most hazardous terrain in the world. Much of what Rimbaud imagined at 20 in his masterpiece, A Season in Hell, he would later live through in the mountains and deserts of Aden. Nicholl writes some of the clearest, most lyrical, and least academic historical prose today.

I also read Storm of Steel, Ernst Junger's brilliant, harrowing memoir of fighting in the trenches of the First World War, one of the finest and most unsparing books about war ever written -- required reading, I would suggest, at a time when politicians without experience of war are trying to sell the Iraq debacle as a "product," sanitized of human suffering.

Zbigniew Herbert's Collected Poems, Guy Davenport's essays, and H.G. Wells' complete short stories (terrific to rediscover as an adult) have also been wonderful to read, as has Rebecca West's The Meaning of Treason, everything I could find by the historian/journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, and a terrific true tale World War II espionage, Agent Zigzag, by Ben Macintyre.

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Wow! What a list. I see here the mind of a writer at work...looks like Nicholas is working on a book that involves war and maybe espionage, as well as some travel to distant shores. You can read a 1947 review of Rebecca West's book at the NY TImes (register for free). It is out of print although Powells and amazon both list numerous used copies. I will most certainly be looking for Charles Nicholl's books (how did I miss this one - Arthur Rimbaud is so up my alley!) and I've been impressed by Ernst Junger in the past - nice to see him show up here. And can you believe that Potocki book (in a nice handy Penguin classics edition) - does that sound amazing or what?!

And oh just go read Rebecca West - always and forever, the wonderful Rebecca West.

Thanks for stopping by Nicholas! More literary delights from 2007 tomorrow - this time from Lisa Ann Sandell.