Amit Majmudar: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian reminds me of how “more can be more”

Lysley Tenorio: Bharati Mukherjee as catalyst and inspiration

Deborah Baker on Lafcadio Hearn and “the Orient at home”

Viet Thanh Nguyen: We still live in Ralph Ellison’s moment

About what could be: C. D. Wright’s impact on Patrick Johnson’s Gatekeeper

Jeffrey Colvin: The wide-ranging influences that helped inspire Africaville

Lauren Groff on the “profound generosity” of James Salter

Baldwin and Merwin: Matthew Zapruder’s guiding spirits in Father’s Day

Kimberly King Parsons salutes Eileen Myles, Denis Johnson, and other voices she “would follow anywhere”

Liza Wieland: From Dickinson to Mary Oliver, a lineage of poets behind Paris, 7 A.M.

Forrest Gander: Writing from the edge of the abyss—the books that influenced Be With

Kali Fajardo-Anstine: the “old universal truths” of Chicano pioneer Arturo Islas

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”