"I love Thomas Hardy. I don’t think a lot of people know that he was also a great poet and a writer of short stories because he produced so many novels. One of my favorite short stories—and I’m not a big short story fan—is An Imaginative Woman. It’s tragic. People are going to think I’m morbid, loving all these sad books. I actually don’t mind a happy ending in a novel—certainly, it’s nice when it happens. But when you’ve invested so much time and your fingers have pushed through all that paper and you get to the end…well, a tragic ending kind of goes with the tragedy of finishing a book."

"We are indeed amusing ourselves to death. This started when Marshall McLuhan stated that the medium was the message. I said right away that the message was the medium. But, alas, my voice was maybe not loud enough, and/or the medium without a serious message is much more amusing to people. So the entertainers became the gods of the people, who screamed: “Keep entertaining us! We want to die being entertained!” The kings of the world wished the same, and they let their countries fall while they were entertained. This is the only book in this list that was published way back in the 1960s. I hope you can get it."

"Black Like Me, but I felt a way, because as I'm reading I realized it's about a white man dressed in black face in the '60s to see what it feels like to be black. It's cool to see these detailed experiences of how white people treated him, but at the same time, he was able to just go back to his regular white life. But we deal with this shit everyday. We can't just wipe our color off — which is great, I love my color, but it definitely made me feel a way. I'm still glad I saw the perversion that was happening with the treatment of black people, so for that reason, I appreciate the book."

"Bad Behavior is largely about sex, but it’s not cheesy or cheap. In this book of short stories, Gaitskill writes about women in the sex industry, people in power play relationships, S&M, and the general psychology of people who engage in so-called “bad behaviors” in a way that’s honest, sometimes brutal, and always beautiful. (For example, the darkly erotic film Secretary was adapted from a story in the book.) I first read this book around the time that I started Slutever, my blog about sexuality that still exists today, and it gave me confidence that writing about sex was a legitimate pursuit, and could be seen as intelligent, meaningful, and maybe even poetic."