"On Christmas of 1994, I was fifteen and had just come out to my family. I was also an aspiring writer who adored Virginia Woolf. I put Chloe Plus Olivia on my Christmas list, not expecting anyone to actually seek out an anthology of lesbian literature and buy it for me. But my dad did: he made a special trip to the University Bookstore in Seattle; he wrapped it and put it under the tree for me. I devoured the book, took it to college with me years later, then moved into my first apartment with it when I was twenty. It’s long gone now (lost in another move), but I still remember it fondly as a formative literary text, and as a sign that my dad loved and supported me without hesitation."

"It’s one of the most perfectly produced albums ever. The songs are great. It’s definitely Lou Reed at his best. I listened to it thousands of times when I was growing up. It was the must have record when I was at college. Everybody that got into punk had it in their collection at some point. It was a celebration of New York City – a writer writing about their hometown. It was quite a dangerous record. Visually he looked OK, but the music was far more subtle than all the glam stuff that was really in your face, like T-Rex and early Bowie. I was also a big Andy Warhol fan. I’d listened to the Velvets a lot, but it was quite a jump from that to the quality of this record."

"This used to get me when I was in college. I haven’t watched [Tarkovsky’s] films for years now, but they really got my goat. I did not understand anything. I just watched it, and I used to have a visceral reaction with them. And I haven’t seen them for about 20 years, but any of his [would make the list]. I think The Mirror, or even The Sacrifice, or Nostalghia — any one of those just blew my rocks off. Somebody like Polanski, he does a film with the devil or he does a thriller and his DNA is all over it. So when I look at the Tarkovsky films I just think like I could interchange all of them and watch them, each one of them just shook my world."

"When I was in college, first year, I saw it and I really hadn’t been exposed to a lot of European filmmakers. It’s such a ‘film’ film. It wasn’t required viewing, it was just a film playing on campus and I hadn’t been interested in film before then. Nowadays people are deciding to get into film at age five when they’re sitting, watching the Oscars. I really didn’t come out of that culture — I was pretty much a John Wayne fan and that was it. Zabriskie Point was a time when I was in a lot of change and flux and these incredible visuals hit me like they had rearranged the organs in my body. The ending and the free-floating debris and everything is an image that burned itself in my consciousness."

"Before I dropped out to start the Pixies, I was in university in Massachusetts. [Future Pixies guitarist] Joey Santiago and I rented a house in the second year. I took the dark windowless room because it had a stereo and I would just sit in the dark and listen to Iggy Pop and XTC records for hours and hours. The one I listened to the most, though, was This Year's Model. They had it on cassette tape at the music library in college, which I remember had these horrible hard plastic headphones, like something you might find in the Soviet Union in 1959. Instead of studying I'd go in there and listen to Elvis Costello over and over until my ears hurt and my head couldn't take it anymore."

"This novella is explicitly a book about ridicule and caricature—Professor Pnin is a joke of a man on a college campus. He’s an awkward Russian émigré with bad English, false teeth, a clumsy sense of humor, a tendency to burst into tears or take offense at small slights. Everybody on campus can do an impression of him. He’s a clown. But at the core of the book is the idea that there is a Pnin who is as real as the people who ridicule him. You are invited to laugh at him, and then you are humbled and shamed by your own laughter. It’s a gorgeous, hilarious, humane book that uncovers the reality of a man’s life in sly, piecemeal fashion. I think it’s my favorite novel."

"This is generally known as Bergman’s most personal film, a complete masterpiece and triumphant study of childhood and the human condition, but I came to it by accident. This is a bit embarrassing, but I was about fifteen and I thought it was the movie adaptation of Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. To a highly untrained teenager’s eye, there are just enough similarities—like messed-up bourgeois family dynamics as seen through the prism of siblings—that I must have thought, “Well, I guess the whole thing just takes place over Christmas now. And they changed the names. And everyone’s Swedish.” Best cinematic mix-up of my life. Even better than that time in college when I drunkenly watched the second disc of Magnolia first and thought it made total sense."