J. Courtney Sullivan on whom she re-reads: W. H. Auden, Dorothy Parker, Jane Smiley, Richard Yates
“A quintessential black literary hero” and other influences on Jabari Asim’s first novel
Ling Ma: William Maxwell, Bret Easton Ellis, and how fiction can do the impossible
Alexia Arthurs: Jamaica Kincaid’s lesson in “doing and being and desiring without permission”
Musharraf Ali Farooqi: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s world is my own
Luc Sante takes a “headlong plunge” into the lives of nineteenth-century American poets
Morgan Jerkins: Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist made me believe that I could be honest
Cheston Knapp: Weird, feral Ralph Waldo Emerson, wily William Gass, and other influences on Up Up, Down Down
“Nobody Knows My Name”: Manuel Muñoz on Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha
Arthur Phillips probes the “seamless circle” of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire
Carmen Maria Machado: American classics that influenced Her Body and Other Parties
Sara Jaffe: From James Baldwin to Lynne Tillman—four influences on Dryland
Eugene Lim: American classics that influenced Dear Cyborgs, mostly in pairs
Julie Buntin: Liberated by Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
Sarah Manguso: Thoreau, Annie Dillard, William Maxwell, and “lessons of constraint” on 300 Arguments
Nick Norwood: What Carson McCullers knew about cotton mills and misery