"I first read this in college. I’m really into short story collections and essays, they’re my jam. I talk a lot and I’m very verbose in my writing, but she’s very much the opposite. Sometimes she’ll have a short story that is a page and it’s brilliant, and you’re like, ‘Oh, you can do that, cool.’ A phenomenal book. I usually don’t reread books, but I’ve reread this one."

"I’m choosing Paranoid the single, not the album. Everything they did before that and the rest of the Paranoid album were really doomy. I liked the fact that Paranoid, the song, was singalong-able… if there’s such a word. I can’t explain why I liked it so much, it just stood out for me as a serious attempt at writing a great rock song that could be played on the radio."

"Version Control is perhaps the strangest fictional work of appropriated voices and subjects. It’s set in a surreal near future — or several near futures — as well as in several pasts. Though issues of race play virtually no role in the stories, one character, an African-American physicist, recalls dropping out of a writing course because the professor thought he should be mining his heritage instead of inventing science fiction."

"Another obvious choice, but I have so much love for DFW. I have always been more drawn to his non-fiction, and this collection of essays is my favorite. The first writing of his that I ever read was the title essay of this collection, and it made me want to be a better journalist. It think DFW is a writer that generally inspires other writers to want to be better."