"I’m currently reading this book, which follows a matsutake mushroom, which is one of the most valuable mushrooms in the world and grows in the destruction and ruins of human disturbance. I’d been talking with my friend Bella about the power of mushrooms, then I saw this in a bookshop in New York and it caught my eye. It’s an anthropological and environmental study, but it’s almost written like a novel. It explores questions about how humans are going to survive in capitalist destruction, through collaborative survival and multi-species landscapes."

"I really love the enigmatic, haunting approach of this film—how it presents this all-girls boarding school, repressed and rife with secret undercurrents of sexual longing, that then ruptures upon colliding with the mysterious and raw natural world. It’s such a fascinating film to puzzle over, and I find it inspiring how the writer of the original novel, Joan Lindsay, by not providing a solution to the mystery and instead allowing the mystery itself to be the focus, upended narrative expectations and created something so beguiling and unforgettable."

"Yes, a few of the lines are easy to mock (“I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.”) Yes, the constant use of “thee” is grating. But my love for this novel isn’t rational. I have no interest in defending it. I loved it from first to last. No final page has ever left me as shattered as this one."

"The first and only fan letter I wrote to an author (other than to Gloria Steinem) was to Wally Lamb. It started with, “How can a man have written this book?” I bathed in Wally Lamb’s creation of a flawed but fascinating heroine teen girl who morphs into a sometimes misled, powerful and flawed adult woman. Her life’s adventures and choices, both positive and positively horrid, still touch me on my third, fourth and fifth read of this novel. (I loved it so much I voiced the book on tape.)"

"The first novel that messed me up. I’ve read it so many times—first in my late teens, when I was in my full horror fan mode. In Ireland, where I lived, there was no such thing as a streetlight, so you looked outside and your own imagination would decide what was there. But there was something about the descriptions of the Bramford, the apartment that Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse move into, that was my first descriptive explanation of New York living. Way before I saw the movie, the story leapt off the page."

"This novel was handed to me on a silver platter by my husband, who said, "You cannot die without reading this." I keep coming back to it because it's so detailed in recording the inner life of Dick Diver, the central character. His yearning — to save his mentally unstable wife, Nicole — just keeps unfolding. That aching is quite destructive but also so understandable. The word I think of with this story is "fragile." I was utterly struck by the fineness of Fitzgerald's writing and the timelessness of Dick and Nicole's failures."

"A work of genius. But more important—and from a purely selfish point of view—a woman wrote it. That might seem ridiculous to male writers, but a man never has to think twice about the gender of genius. He’s got too many examples on his side of the fence. Eliot was the first woman I read who could go toe-to-toe with, say, Tolstoy. I was 15. Since then, I’ve learned how many grand achievements in the novel have been female, but when I was a teenager, that was news to me."

"In Argentina’s ‘dirty war’ in the ’70s, the military government had thousands of activists and political opponents ‘disappeared.’ This novel is about a mother and father dealing with the disappearance of their son. It’s a moving book that also has a lot of dark comedy in it. For instance, the parents accept free nose jobs in exchange for a debt. It also captures the comic absurdity of the bureaucracy of a dictatorship. What’s most interesting to me is, as one character makes clear, the truth tellers in life are so often written off as crazy."