"This collection of devotional songs (or poems) is a very moving and insightful read. Tagore makes you feel his own sense of wonder at the ways in which he feels connected to God and also his distance from him in very personal and original ways. Will Oldham and Mick Turner set some of these to music and I have been very inspired by their readings. Going back to the original works again and again over the years is very rewarding."

"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.”"

"It’s not often that a writer makes me laugh out loud, but [David] Sedaris does. He brings me to tears. It’s to the point where I can’t read his writing in public because people think I’m having some kind of meltdown. In this collection of essays, [When You Are Engulfed in Flames] he has a way of finding humour in the strangest and most painful moments, like a week with a creepy baby-sitter, or the death of his mother."

"The Teshigahara box set is so invaluable to my collection. Those three films have taught me so much about the power of collaboration. In tandem with Kobo Abe, Toru Takemitsu, and Toshi Ichiyanagi, Teshigahara was able to manifest three very disparate yet cohesive worlds. I was most surprised by Pitfall, which I find to be more overlooked than the other two films (Woman in the Dunes and The Face of Another). The existential desolation of this film is all-consuming."