12 Books That Changed Dodie Bellamy’s Life
Kathy Acker, Great Expectations
Charlotte Bronte, Villette
Catherine Clement, Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture
Dennis Cooper, My Mark
Robert Kelly, A Controversy of Poets
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror
László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion
Ovid, Metamorphosis
Sylvia Plath, Ariel
Anne Sexton, Transformations
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Bram Stoker, Dracula
12 Books That Changed Tamara Faith Berger’s Life
Kathy Acker, Kathy Goes to Haiti (in Young Lust); The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by The Black Tarantula
Guillame Apollinaire, The Eleven Thousand Rods
Georges Bataille, Guilty; Story of the Eye
Dennis Cooper, Closer
Samuel Delaney, The Mad Man
Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
Xaviera Hollander, The Happy Hooker
Natsuo Kirino, Grotesque
Heather Lewis, Notice
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
10 Books And 1 Play That Changed Rebecca Brown’s Life
Günter Grass, Cat and Mouse
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson
Franz Kafka, The Great Wall of China
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
William Shakespeare, King Lear
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Garry Wills, Why I am a Catholic
Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
The Bible
10 Books That Changed Barbara Browning’s Life
Anna Akhmatova (translated by Stanley Kunitz), Poems
John Ashbery, The Double Dream of Spring
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse
André Breton, Nadja
Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Harry Mathews, The Journalist
Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais
Gertrude Stein, How to Write
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques
14 Books That Changed Meghan Daum’s Life
Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo, He’s Just Not That Into You
Lisa Birnbach, The Preppy Handbook
Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything: “‘Minced ginger! Who knew?'”
Judy Blume, Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret: “This book changed my life in that it did not change my life even though it was apparently supposed to. After being underwhelmed by this book I decided would not read books simply because everyone else was, which was potentially life changing in that it saved me the ordeal of having to read any of the Flowers in the Attic series.”
Joan Didion, The White Album: “‘I want to write like this! Also, what is “detritus?”‘”
John Irving, The World According to Garp: “Perfunctory high school reading for aspiring writers.”
Lorrie Moore, Self Help: “Perfunctory college reading for aspiring writers, especially if female.”
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead: “Changed life for short time but life quickly changed back.”
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint: “‘Gross! On the other hand, this shiksa thing might actually work to my benefit.'”
Sam Shepard, Seven Plays: “Didn’t really understand the material but was captivated by author’s almost intolerably sexy photo on front jacket.”
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation: “‘Am I supposed to want to write like this? Also, what does “transvaluing” mean?'”
Bernard Waber, Lyle, Lyle Crocodile: “Made me, at age 5, yearn for an Upper East Side Manhattan townhouse with checkerboard marble floors.”
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth: “‘Wow, New York was always expensive!'”
Laura Ingalls Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek: “Made me, at age 8, yearn for a dugout sod house.”
12 Books That Changed Helen DeWitt’s Life
Peter Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
A.C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace
Gerd Gigerenzer, Reckoning with Risk
Erving Goffman, Asylums; The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life; Stigma: the Management of Damaged Identity
Michael Lewis, Moneyball
Jim Pitman, Probability
Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu
Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy
Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information
11 Books That Changed Samantha Irby’s Life
Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out Of Carolina
Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo, He’s Just Not That Into You
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao
Renina Jarmon, Black Girls Are From The Future
Mindy Kaling, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?
Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Caitlin Moran, How To Be A Woman
Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Baratunde Thurston, How To Be Black
Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped
Sabrina Ward Harrison, Spilling Open
13 Books That Changed Eileen Myles’s Life
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Gwendolyn Brooks, Maude Martha
Frank Conroy, Stoptime
Judy Grahn, A Woman is Talking to Death
Christopher Isherwood, My Guru & His Disciple
Jill Johnston, Lesbian Nation
Kevin Killian, Bedrooms Have Windows
Violette Le Duc, La Batarde
Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
Frank O’Hara, The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara
Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto
Robert Walser, The Walk
John Wieners, Hotel Wentley Poems
11 Books That Changed Ann Rower’s Life
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
Emily Dickinson, Poems
June Jordan, My Own Where
Chris Kraus, Torpor
Heather Lewis, Notice
Cookie Mueller, Walking Through Water in a Pool Painted Black
Eileen Myles, Inferno
Frank O’Hara, In Memory of My Feelings
Sapphire, Push
David Wojnarovicz, In the Shadow of the American Dream
Mary Woronov, Niagara
11 Books That Changed Suzanne Scanlon’s Life
Kathy Acker, Don Quixote
Marguerite Duras, The Lover
Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior
Mary Gordon, Final Payments
Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
Toni Morrisson, Beloved
John Robbins, Diet for a New America
Nawal El Saadawii, Woman at Point Zero
David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own; Mrs. Dalloway
6 Books, 1 Story and 2 Essays That Changed Sarah Schulman’s Life
Rabih Alemeddine, I The Divine
Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf
Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank
Jean Genet, Funeral Rites
Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody
Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”
Carson McCullers, “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud” in Ballad of the Sad Cafe
Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism
Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”
8 Books That Changed Penelope Trunk’s Life
Kathy Acker, Great Expectations: “The first book that I knew I would like that I couldn’t understand.”
Judy Blume, Are You There God It’s Me, Margaret: “The first author to mirror my hopes and fears back to me.”
Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales: “I love that he wrote about the dirty underbelly of his world.”
Sandra Cisneros, House on Mango Street: “So easy to read and I wanted to write like her.”
Annie Ernaux, Frozen Woman: “The fourth book I read by her and I realized all her books are the same story. Writers have one story they tell over and over again. Really took the pressure off me.”
Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior: “Made my own bad behavior seem like literary fodder.”
Susan Minot, Monkeys: “I realized I want to write books people can read in one sitting.”
Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck: “My introduction to feminism.”
