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
Shanthi Sekaran on time and received magic: Beloved’s gifts to Lucky Boy
Amitava Kumar: Philip Roth teaches me to be a bit more honest
Annie Liontas: Influences, identity, and what defines the “self-respecting immigrant novel”
Vanessa Hua: Kindred spirits in the heroines of Little Women and the Little House books
Dismiss Kurt Vonnegut’s “modest, winking profundity” at your own peril, says Ron Currie, Jr.
Lorenzo Carcaterra: Elmore Leonard “brought his characters close enough to life they could be touched”
Putting the alternate in alternate history: Whitman, Poe, and “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”
Shawn Vestal: The genius of Henry James’s “exquisitely repressed” The Ambassadors
Elmore Leonard: John Steinbeck “set me free”
Sandra Simonds: Plath, Ginsberg, and an “urgently necessary” personal canon
Karen Russell on how Joy Williams writes the unspeakable
Geoffrey O’Brien: The House of Walworth, American Gothic, and Gilded Age literature