“I bought it because everyone else did, I guess,” says the novelist and author, most recently, of “Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write: An Autobiography in Essays.”

What books are on your night stand?

On my night stand are a lamp, my alarm clock and my reading glasses. Next to my night stand, I’m embarrassed to say, are many piles of books. Books that I’ve been reading include Dorothy Day’s diaries, “The Duty of Delight”; Jacques Attali’s “Alger 1943: L’Annee des Dupes”; Natalie Bakopoulos’s new novel set in Greece, “Scorpionfish”; “Map: Collected and Last Poems,” by Wislawa Szymborska; “The Color of Law,” by Richard Rothstein; and Maaza Mengiste’s amazing “The Shadow King.”

What’s the last great book you read?

Many books are really good; “great,” for me, is a pretty limited category. And this year, I’ve reread both “Anna Karenina” and “War and Peace,” which rather complicates the question. Aside from those two, I’d say probably Vasily Grossman’s “Stalingrad,” which I read last winter; and before that, Walter Kempowski’s “All for Nothing.”

Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?

See above — I’d been meaning to read Grossman’s “Life and Fate” for years (it’s in those piles by my bed), and when “Stalingrad” was published in the summer of 2019, the prequel, if you will, to “Life and Fate,” I wanted to start with it. With the result that I still haven’t yet read “Life and Fate,” of course.

Can a great book be badly written? What other criteria can overcome bad prose?

That’s a tough one. I’d venture that a great book could potentially be indifferently written; but not badly written, no. If it’s badly written, it’s not a great book. What makes a book great, as Camus rightly says in “Create Dangerously,” is its truthfulness, its honesty about the human experience. To be truthful, you have to use language precisely, judiciously, with, as Nabokov would have it, the imagination of a scientist and the precision of a poet. If you fail at the level of language, if you write in clichés or secondhand phrases, your failure is metaphysical, and you’re doomed. Prose can be clunky, uneven, even ugly, and be true — but that’s not “bad prose”; it’s just unbeautiful prose, which isn’t the same thing.

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Here is a direct link to the complete interview.