"I was tempted to include the complete works of Shakespeare, but I'll instead cite a great play that echos with “The Odyssey.” “Coriolanus,” is Shakespeare's most sustained depiction of a war veteran, which presents a brutal and heart-breaking portrait of ultra-masculinity and how it can break a man. There’s also “The Tempest,” about islands, magic, the sea, power, exile and colonialism, whose rich, vivid descriptions of nature were very much in my mind when I was working on my translation of “The Odyssey.”"

"The thundering success of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain … required the intervention of the rector to keep us from spending the whole night awake, waiting for Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat to kiss. Or the rare tension of all of us sitting up on our beds in order not to miss a word of the disordered philosophical duels between Naptha and his friend Settembrini. The reading that night lasted for more than an hour and was celebrated in the dormitory with a round of applause."

"The Kid saved my sanity while I waited for my kid. I’m 32, I’ve had a home visit, I’ve filled out the paperwork, and now I’m waiting and waiting to be picked by a birth mother to adopt her baby. Through it all, I keep on my person a tattered copy of this Dan Savage book. How the story of a white gay couple adopting a baby boy feels like exactly the same journey as a single black woman adopting a baby girl is its magic."