"If I could have a meal with anyone, it would be Miles Davis. It would be so cool to hear his stories and sit back and talk about jazz. Miles moved to NYC around the same age as I did, and he was a transformative player in the evolution of jazz music as we know it. This autobiography was his chance to tell all."

"My mother gave me this book when I was a teenager keen on following in the footsteps of my chef brother, Joseph. It is a leather-bound book with gold-embossment on the cover, the photography is magnificent and mouth-watering, and it’s full of great stories and classic recipes from around the world. It’s mandatory reading for our culinary team at TAK Room."

"I thought its arc of character was beautifully captured. [Martin Scorsese] has got so many dramatic views — men fed up with life, the situation, the system. These days people are more experienced [as filmmakers] but we’ve just been poorly making movies lately. We used to tell beautiful, humane stories. We used to care about characters instead of just blowing some f***ing building down."

"Any collection of John Cheever’s short stories. I’m not a big fan of much of what passes itself off as literary fiction, finding it to be insipid, self-indulgent, plotless, and pointless. However, Cheever could write about everyday life and make it fascinating. His psychological insights are deft, never heavy-handed, and sometimes, as in his story “The Enormous Radio,” he veers into some really strange territory."

"I didn’t appear in the movie, but Oldboy, directed by Park Chan-wook. That’s one of my favorites. The movie’s narrative talks about human desires that are taboo — you’re not supposed to talk about them. You think about them, but you’re not supposed to think about them. The movie tells these forbidden stories with daring, experimentally and artistically, and it tells them very well."

"The level of craft at work in each of the poems in “Don’t Call Us Dead” is exceptional. These are poems about black men and their imperiled, impassioned bodies, what it means to live with HIV, and so much more. There is pain here but there is so much joy, so much fierce resistance to anything that dares to temper the stories being told here."

"Narrative films will never grow stale as long as filmmakers have tricks like Rashomon structures in their bag. Not only filled with fantastic acting, tremendous cinematography, and a haunting soundtrack, Rashomon attempts what great films always strive for—to express an inexpressible . . . in this case, the nature of truth, or . . . the nature of humans’ inability to realize the fallibility of their own perception, their own stories."

"Bloom is talking about love, yes, but there’s nothing ordinary about any of the love stories in this book. There’s always a catch, and there’s always something that takes her story into unfamiliar terrain. As I read her book, I became almost frightened to see where she’d take me next. It was always someplace I’d never been; but in the end it felt very much like home."