“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”

Ray Bradbury: Prophetic visionary, “word-wizard,” and next-door neighbor

Fernando A. Flores on The Quixote Cult, a lost border novel that “depicts a time and place like no other”

Jarred McGinnis: The boundary-pushing American authors who taught this emigrant how to write

Ariel Delgado Dixon: Three influences on Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You

Cara Blue Adams: Denis Johnson’s “lush minimalism” and other influences on You Never Get It Back

Leopoldine Core: Nella Larsen’s radical Passing and other influences on When Watched

Sarah Pinsker: Octavia Butler, Woody Guthrie, and other classics that inspired my debut

Shangyang Fang: Hearing the “meticulous music” in contemporary American poetry