Kimberly King Parsons salutes Eileen Myles, Denis Johnson, and other voices she “would follow anywhere”

Liza Wieland: From Dickinson to Mary Oliver, a lineage of poets behind Paris, 7 A.M.

Forrest Gander: Writing from the edge of the abyss—the books that influenced Be With

Kali Fajardo-Anstine: the “old universal truths” of Chicano pioneer Arturo Islas

J. Courtney Sullivan on whom she re-reads: W. H. Auden, Dorothy Parker, Jane Smiley, Richard Yates

“A quintessential black literary hero” and other influences on Jabari Asim’s first novel

Ling Ma: William Maxwell, Bret Easton Ellis, and how fiction can do the impossible

Alexia Arthurs: Jamaica Kincaid’s lesson in “doing and being and desiring without permission”

Musharraf Ali Farooqi: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s world is my own

Luc Sante takes a “headlong plunge” into the lives of nineteenth-century American poets

Morgan Jerkins: Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist made me believe that I could be honest

Cheston Knapp: Weird, feral Ralph Waldo Emerson, wily William Gass, and other influences on Up Up, Down Down

“Nobody Knows My Name”: Manuel Muñoz on Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha

Arthur Phillips probes the “seamless circle” of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire

Carmen Maria Machado: American classics that influenced Her Body and Other Parties

Sara Jaffe: From James Baldwin to Lynne Tillman—four influences on Dryland