"The ultimate prose book. There is no one greater or darker than Carson. This book follows a creature named Red who is part boy, part winged monster. It's a coming of age story about a Kafkaesque boy and the exploration of his body and sexuality. Absolutely brilliant from start to finish. I used a quote from it to open the last book I wrote, "What's it like to be a woman listening in the dark?" That's the million dollar question."

"We'll finish with my favorite hardcore record of all. Converge, to me, stand apart from all genres and scenes as just simply the best heavy band in the world, possibly ever. I never tire of their output, they're endlessly inventive, exciting, weird, vicious, and just plain fucking brilliant. Of all their records this is my favorite as it just seems a little more direct, stripped back, dare I say it, hardcore than the others. This is definitely my desert island hardcore album."

"Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were all constantly responding to, or writing back against, the Homeric poems. The Athenian tragedy that is maybe most deeply engaged with rewriting and recreating “The Odyssey,” is Euripides' “Helen”, a provocative, brainy, funny play about the myth that Helen never went to Troy in the first place—the same myth that is central to HD's brilliant sequence “Helen in Egypt.” I translated the Euripides “Helen,” for a collection of Greek tragedy translations, “The Greek Plays.”"

"Captured used to be my favourite Jenkins romance, but Night Hawk recently took the top spot because its lead couple is just so brilliant. This historical romance follows an infamous Wild West gunslinger turned US Marshall as he transports a feisty prisoner. They prove her innocence, fall in love, thwart various nefarious plots on their journey home, and generally run around being badass. I especially fell in love with the plucky, witty heroine and her completely relatable thirst for revenge."

"Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie both look amazing in this film. It’s also a brilliant document of Venice in the early ’70s. It’s a stunning-looking film. And interestingly, Geoff’s father-in-law was the main cameraman! The scene at the top of the bell tower in St. Mark’s Square, where Donald Sutherland’s legs are dangling—they’re Geoff’s father-in-law’s legs! I don’t think Donald fancied the climb?!! It’s also the best horror ending ever, without a doubt. —Billy Fuller"

"The brilliant teacher I had for a Shakespeare seminar at Yale (Joel Dorius) asked us one day if we had an idea of what heaven, for us, would consist of. What you’d hope it would be. His own answer: “Just to sit in a screening room, watching Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise projected repeatedly and endlessly throughout eternity.” Hard to argue with that when you see and resee this classic. Dorius’s version of heaven beats hell out of harps and angels."

"This was the first political film I ever saw that had strong genre elements. I saw it when I was a teenager, so the story was quite obscure to me, and yet I fell into it because I was so enthralled by the pacing. It’s a brilliant portrait of what it means to be pushed into telling something other than the truth. I found myself riveted by all the different perspectives that can inform how we understand a single event."