"Full disclosure: Samantha Irby is my real life actual friend, but that’s only because I was so rabidly obsessed with her perfect, brilliant, peerlessly funny writing that I flew to Chicago and forced her to love me, so I think that hardly counts as a traditional conflict of interest. I was a fan FIRST. This book doesn’t come out until March, but I was lucky enough to read an early manuscript, and it’s exactly the collection of new Samantha Irby essays you’ve been yearning for, the perfect spring promise to keep you trucking through the winter."

"This inspired me to want to write parodies and do parodies. I read it on the bed as a kid — I was eight years old when [his brother] Keenen [Wayans] sent me that script, and I [had] never laughed so hard. It inspired me. I knew that was what I wanted to do. It’s really my number one — I mean, I think it’s crazy if I put my brother as number one. You’d think I was being biased, of which I probably am, but I’m not, because I really love that movie and my brother. I think he’s a brilliant genius."

"It was hard to pick just one Bergman film—so many brilliant choices. I suppose I picked Winter Light because it is so perfectly bleak, the very essence of the frozen grayness of winter. This is one of Bergman’s famous “God’s silence” films. The dilemma of Pastor Ericsson’s trying to find meaning in a godless universe (or at least a universe where God will not answer) is hard to watch without personally taking on his existential dread. Bergman never blinks. He doesn’t hand us any easy answers or life-affirming reassurances. It’s grim. A great work of art."

"This came in the wake of Remain In Light as a side project. I'd seen Talking Heads at Eric's, which was my world back then. Although slightly older people said it was like Can and introducing sound collages, I didn't think Can were that funky, but this is. It was quite an amazing album really, and freaked everybody out when it was released. 'The Jezebel Spirit' and 'America Is Waiting', I guess, were the standout tracks that I got, but the end track ['Mountain Of Needles'] as well, which had slowed-down sounds and voices. I thought it was brilliant."

"A brilliant insight into perhaps our greatest actor. I have read nearly every book about Brando but Mizruchi is the first to dissect his method and his talent in a way I have never seen anyone accomplish, including the subject himself. With access to archives never before shared by Brando’s estate, the reader will discover just how he managed to navigate the film industry as the first great actor to become a movie star. Fascinating, not only for people in the film industry, but for anyone who might be interested in this captivating, enigmatic and legendary performer."

"I used to use this in a class I taught on sound. There’s a part where Tati is in a waiting room and sitting on all these squeaky chairs, and then you hear clickety-clackety sounds in the hallway. I love the contrast between how clean and slick everything in that set is with his little umbrella and raincoat. It’s all so cartoony, but you’re worried about this character the whole time. Everything is done through gesture, and Tati’s performance is so brilliant it makes you feel such concern for this man drifting in this modern world."

"It’s one of the most influential records ever, on me. I’ve talked about it many times. I always feel duty bound to ram it home, what an amazing achievement to get so much Marxist anger into an album, which is actually really delicately played. People always accuse them of being Smiths copyists but it’s much faster, stuff like ‘Antinature’ and ‘The Well Of Loneliness,’ ‘An MP Speaks’, it’s a seamless album that can grind you into submission, like all good communists should. Brilliant cover as well. Of all my records this is definitely my most played piece of vinyl."