"Five volumes of sheer bliss. There’s almost nothing fiction can offer that isn’t in this book: an 18th Century, post-modern, Zen, worldly, otherworldly, gorgeous, funny, sorrowful, gripping, saga of a large, staggeringly wealthy Qin Dynasty family. Stunningly well translated, (the first three volumes by David Hawkes, the final two by John Minford, Hawkes’ son-in-law). It takes a while (or it did me) to keep the many, many characters straight, but it’s definitely worth the trouble."

"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.”"

"If all the other books on my list were taken away, the one that would accompany me to the desert island is this small book of inspired poetry by the great Bengali man of letters, Tagore. When translated into English, it won him the Nobel Prize in 1913 and made him an international celebrity. Gitanjali turns the spiritual life into a love affair between the poet and God, a theme that is thousands of years old. In my heart of hearts, I wish I was Tagore."

"I love this picture because it showed me at a very young age the scope an animated movie could have. It also inspired me to look deeper into this genre and the different filmmakers working in it. I loved the graphic novels and it was the first time I saw a comic book translated to the big screen. It unspooled at a second run by my house and I saw it a TON of times. I also believe this is why I own a red Japanese motorcycle that goes really really fast. AKIRA HUUUUH?!"

"As a war correspondent, I have read many of the classic eyewitness accounts. I bought this book when I visited Vietnam in 1997. It’s one of the rare novels about that terrible war written from their perspective by a North Vietnamese student. It’s brutal, gut-wrenching, heart-breaking and desperately human. It’s also vital to remember that as much as the U.S. suffered on all fronts, Vietnam came off far, far worse. This book was first translated and sold in the west, ten years before it could be published in Vietnam."