“Ancient and Modern Both”: Painter David Ligare Draws Inspiration from John Steinbeck and Robinson Jeffers

Poet and Revolutionary José Martí on Walt Whitman, the United States, and the Universal “I”

“The Beauty in the Muck”: Raj Tawney on the Luminous Legacy of Pete Hamill

“Funny, Scary, and Delightfully Weird”: Lena Valencia on the Many Faces of Literary Terror

Dinaw Mengestu on American Writers Who Have Astounded, Moved, Haunted, and Influenced Him

A Voice for the Speechless Princess: Sarah Ruden on Lavinia, Vergil’s Aeneid, and the Wisdom of Ursula K. Le Guin

“The Ones That Nobody Assigned”: Bear Author Julia Phillips on Building a Personal Canon

“Upside-Down and Sideways”: Research and Revelation in Novelist Rachel Lyon’s Reading List

“A Reverence for Their Mystery”: Essayist Jed Munson on Rereading Maxine Hong Kingston and Aldo Leopold

“Writing without trying to find solutions”: debut novelist Farah Ali on the authors who nourish her imagination

“An olive branch and a survival tool”: Raj Tawney on Madhur Jaffrey’s classic cookbook An Invitation to Indian Cooking

The haunted house and the freedom of isolation: Nghiem Tran on how Shirley Jackson inspired his mesmeric debut

‘She wrote about subjects you weren’t supposed to write poems about’: Sarah Bridgins on the works that inspired her gut-punch debut collection

Monsters author Claire Dederer on the “brilliant, fierce urgency” of Pearl Cleage’s Mad at Miles

“A clear voice tends to be contagious.” Biography of X author Catherine Lacey on the mysteries of influence

Kevin Maloney: learning to dress up tragedy in fiction and “serve it to the reader in the form of dark comedy”