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

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

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

Karen Russell on how Joy Williams writes the unspeakable

Geoffrey O’Brien: The House of Walworth, American Gothic, and Gilded Age literature