Author Dinaw Mengestu says good books help you to recognize yourself in the unfamiliar.
Author Yiyun Li doesn't just study people on the subway—she studies her characters, unflinchingly imagining their gaze until she understands them fully.
Thirty Girls author Susan Minot says great writing—like T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"—is a source of nourishment readers turn to again and again.
The Nobel Prize winner is a role model for writers looking to bridge the personal, domestic details of the short story with the global forces of history, author Kyle Minor says.
The lesson author Dorthe Nors took from Ingmar Bergman: It's not drugs, poverty, or wild lovers that make a great writer. It's discipline and time alone.
Rebecca Mead, New Yorker staff writer and author of My Life in Middlemarch, shares what Eliot's Middlemarch taught her about love, marriage, and journalism.
Author and journalist Jennifer Percy was a committed physics major until a Lawrence Sargent Hall story showed her a more satisfying way to approach life's complexities.
Author Ben Marcus says the beautiful but sorrowful strangeness of Kafka's "A Message from the Emperor" make it a perfect piece of writing.
The veteran author says Theodore Roethke's poetry is a reminder that sometimes you're hot, sometimes you're not.
Highlights from 12 months of interviews with writers about their craft and the authors they love
Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" helps remind the Joy Luck Club author to capture the "microscopic" details that make her characters unique.
Committing the words of Wallace Stevens to memory unlocked an emotional and physical magic within her, Bender says.
Author Paul Auster says Beckett shows how important laughter is in writing.
Russell Banks's biggest inspiration isn't another author—it's a gravestone inscription lurking near his desk.
The Eat, Pray, Love author celebrates the late Jack Gilbert, whose works challenge readers to find joy within suffering.
Bob Shacochis confronts the tension between exploring the everyday "frivolity" of our private worlds and making broad statements about the one we share.
Young-adult novelist Robin Wasserman says the famous horror writer empowered her as a teen reader by capturing the uneasy teenage phase between childhood and adulthood.
Alexie never thought he could leave his reservation to pursue a writing career—but a line written by Adrian C. Louis taught him to venture outside the "reservation of his mind."
Andre Dubus III, author of Dirty Love and The House of Sand and Fog, explains why the best work happens when you "back the fuck off."
His new book translates works by Karl Kraus, whose misgivings toward progress mirror Franzen's belief that technology can be "very harmful" to artistic production.