Nick Norwood: What Carson McCullers knew about cotton mills and misery

Sarah Manguso: Thoreau, Annie Dillard, William Maxwell, and “lessons of constraint” on 300 Arguments

Shanthi Sekaran on time and received magic: Beloved’s gifts to Lucky Boy

Vanessa Hua: Kindred spirits in the heroines of Little Women and the Little House books

Leopoldine Core: Nella Larsen’s radical Passing and other influences on When Watched

Shawn Vestal: The genius of Henry James’s “exquisitely repressed” The Ambassadors

Putting the alternate in alternate history: Whitman, Poe, and “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”

Dismiss Kurt Vonnegut’s “modest, winking profundity” at your own peril, says Ron Currie, Jr.

Sandra Simonds: Plath, Ginsberg, and an “urgently necessary” personal canon

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

Playwright-turned-novelist Kirk Lynn on Joe Brainard, James Thurber, and other influences on Rules for Werewolves

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

Alexandra Kleeman: Philip K. Dick’s “gnostic logic” and other influences on You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

Amitava Kumar: Philip Roth teaches me to be a bit more honest

Annie Liontas: Influences, identity, and what defines the “self-respecting immigrant novel”