"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."

"Jorge Luis Borges thought this short, hypnotic novel to be one of the best ever written, and Gabriel García Márquez said it freed him to imagine the world of One Hundred Years of Solitude. A man is told by his dying mother to go find his father. He embarks on the journey and falls into a nightmarish world that may be populated entirely by ghosts."

"I’ve sent both my older kids Lolita and advised them to read the first chapter. They’re older than when I had it read to me – I was about 12. I didn’t read the whole thing [at the time]. The point was the first chapter is very short, half a page. It’s undeniably beautiful even to a young child, to someone who doesn’t really understand."

"Another strong stylist that I imitated for a while was a woman named Joy Williams who had a short story collection called Taking Care. She has such a singular voice. It hasn’t really changed over the years. I remember she was talking about a girl having a fantasy about her beau and she said, ‘He was feeling fine, and fancy too.’ It was such music to me."

"It offers a way of re-ordering ordinary experience. It argues that when we perceive the actions and intentions of others, we tend to make mistakes. We see things that aren’t there and we make predictions that we ought not to make: we privilege the ‘person’ and we discount the influence of the ‘situation.’ It speaks, in short, to the very broadest questions of human perception."

"I read “Self-Reliance” when I was 17 as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley in the ‘50s. In this short essay, Emerson takes a stance against conformity and insists on trusting your own judgement, on finding your own path, on living in the present and augmenting what is unique to your own character. These are the principles that have shaped my life and work."