Poet and Revolutionary José Martí on Walt Whitman, the United States, and the Universal “I”

“The Beauty in the Muck”: Raj Tawney on the Luminous Legacy of Pete Hamill

“Funny, Scary, and Delightfully Weird”: Lena Valencia on the Many Faces of Literary Terror

Dinaw Mengestu on American Writers Who Have Astounded, Moved, Haunted, and Influenced Him

A Voice for the Speechless Princess: Sarah Ruden on Lavinia, Vergil’s Aeneid, and the Wisdom of Ursula K. Le Guin

“The Ones That Nobody Assigned”: Bear Author Julia Phillips on Building a Personal Canon

“Upside-Down and Sideways”: Research and Revelation in Novelist Rachel Lyon’s Reading List

“A Reverence for Their Mystery”: Essayist Jed Munson on Rereading Maxine Hong Kingston and Aldo Leopold

“Writing without trying to find solutions”: debut novelist Farah Ali on the authors who nourish her imagination

“An olive branch and a survival tool”: Raj Tawney on Madhur Jaffrey’s classic cookbook An Invitation to Indian Cooking

The haunted house and the freedom of isolation: Nghiem Tran on how Shirley Jackson inspired his mesmeric debut

‘She wrote about subjects you weren’t supposed to write poems about’: Sarah Bridgins on the works that inspired her gut-punch debut collection

Monsters author Claire Dederer on the “brilliant, fierce urgency” of Pearl Cleage’s Mad at Miles

“A clear voice tends to be contagious.” Biography of X author Catherine Lacey on the mysteries of influence

Kevin Maloney: learning to dress up tragedy in fiction and “serve it to the reader in the form of dark comedy”

Marisa Crane: five works that inspired them to create “a complex dystopian world that runs on people’s shame”