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”

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

Viet Thanh Nguyen: We still live in Ralph Ellison’s moment

Maggie Nelson: American classics that influenced the writing of The Argonauts

Lorenzo Carcaterra: Elmore Leonard “brought his characters close enough to life they could be touched”

Elmore Leonard: John Steinbeck “set me free”

Lev Grossman on Ernest Hemingway, verbal membrane, and The Sun Also Rises

Deborah Baker on Lafcadio Hearn and “the Orient at home”

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