"Daniel Saldaña París is the Mexican Philip Roth, dare I say, and his novel is both satirical and self-reflective, which is my favorite mode of literary expression. I met him a few years ago, and speaking with him about writing fiction was like talking to a long lost twin."

"I love this book almost as much as I hate it. Martin, a thinly disguised version of Leavitt himself, describes the “brat pack” of young writers he was a part of in the New York literary scene of the mid-1980s. It’s sort of like watching a train wreck, fascinating and horrifying at once."

"Nabokov’s essays on Russian literature are brilliantly funny and iconoclastic. He loves Gogol and hates Dostoyevsky and accuses him of being like the worst kind of sensationalist, journalistic hack. “Dostoyevsky is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one—with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between.”"

"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."

"This is literary kismet, with screenwriter Truman Capote channeling Henry James—and with a child lead bearing the name of my own daughter, Flora. The story, which takes full measure of the spookiness and unknowability of children, has worked in every format—first James’s novella The Turn of the Screw, then the chamber opera of the same name, and finally this liminal black-and-white film."