Sources, Cited
(Books on my shelves that are worth a damn)

  • Bolaño, Roberto. The Third Reich. Translated by Natasha Wimmer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
(Everyone goes nuts for The Savage Detectives or 2666, but this early novel, unfinished at the time of Bolaño's death, is more approachable though no less complex. The dangers of perpetual gaming enthrall me.)

  • Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley, Penguin, 1999.
(Cerebral writing that is also beautiful, or simple stories told without melodrama. From Borges I've learned that if a piece of art doesn't exist but I want it to, just pretend that it does and start writing about it.)

  • Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New World Library, 2008.
(Getting a handle on the Hero's Journey can be a recipe for formulaic writing, but considering it deeply can allow one to avoid a number of storytelling traps and hopefully set the hero free in the end.)

  • Cortázar, Julio, and Carol Dunlop. Autonauts of the Cosmoroute. Translated by Anne McLean, Archipelago Books, 2007.
(Whenever I read this I'm reminded that the banality of the world is no excuse for not looking with playful eyes. Also, that the oulipo impulse for constraint is best thought of as a travel game.)

  • Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. Pantheon, 2000.
(This is one of the most beautiful machines I've ever seen, a horrifying reality manufactured out of fake documents and artful page layout and prose and emotion. It's one of the books that makes me jealous.)

  • Hemon, Aleksandar. The Question of Bruno. Vintage International, 2001.
(I use this collection as my benchmark for what I think a book of short stories should be doing. "The Sorge Spy Ring" in particular is gold.)

  • Henry, Gordon. The Light People. Michigan State University Press, 2003.
(Henry was my favorite writing professor at Michigan State, and his book is a nested set of short stories - first and last chapters make up one story, second and penultimate make up the next, etc. - a literary Inception before that movie was a thing. Both how this is written and how Henry would give readings from it made me think that being a writer was a worthwhile pursuit.)

  • Murakami, Haruki. Norwegian Wood. Translated by Jay Rubin, Vintage International, 2000.
  • - - -. Underground. Translated by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel, Vintage International, 2001.
(People always go for Murakami's magic realism, and in most cases that's good - 1Q84 is a turd sandwich, though Murakami's crap is better than many writers' best work - but I look at these two for how they grab the details of regular lives and imbue them with significance.)

  • Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. Owl Books, 1996
(It's not about the movie, though I do like the movie. It's about the voice of the narrator, the way he can seem both reasonable and off kilter. There's something gnostic about that voice, that it's trying to articulate a secret that it can't escape from.)

  • Pavić, Milorad. Dictionary of the Khazars. Translated by Christina Pribićević-Zorić. Vintage International, 1989.
(This is, I think, the perfect book, perpetual and absolute. I may never attempt something like this, but I will spend my life chasing after what this book does to me, both in terms of its organization but also its thick brushstrokes of metaphor and madness, the sense that just one more reading will give me the final piece of the ever-expanding puzzle.)

  • Siegel, Lee. Love in a Dead Language. University of Chicago Press, 1999.
(A synthesis of form and function that I admire to no end. I love the idea that narrative need not sit in a narrative container, and that an illicit love story can be lush enough to warrant such treatment.)

  • Soseki, Natsume. Kokoro. Translated by Edwin McClellan, Regnery Publishing, 1957.
(Spare and restrained Japanese modernism. The unapproachable gap between characters is a sad and haunting space in which to linger.)

  • Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories. Modern Library, 1996.
(The stream-of-consciousness headspace, the violent tension between understanding what's going on in any given moment and giving in to the chaos of thought and sensation.)

  • Vizenor, Gerald. Bearheart: the Heirship Chronicles. University of Minnesota Press, 1990.
(A beautifully crafted horrible world falling apart as the characters try to find a hole to pass through that will take them to the next world. Doom is, perhaps, the forgotten happy ending.)