Authors J - R
James, Henry - Gustave Flaubert (“a novelist’s novelist”); Ivan Turgenev; Honore de Balzac (“the master of us all”); Ralph Waldo Emerson; George Eliot
Joyce, James - “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway (“One of the best stories ever written.”); he “read every line” of only three authors: Henrik Ibsen, Ben Jonson, and Gustave Flaubert; Les Lauriers sont Coupes by Dujardin (he credited this book with inspiring his stream-of-consciousness style); Dante Aligheri; Thomas Aquinas; Vico; Giordano Bruno; At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien
Kennedy, A.L. - The Dark by John McGahern; Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson; That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis; Sergeant Getulio by Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro; Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov; Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë; Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut; The Confidence Man by Herman Melville; Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes; The Beach at Falesa/ The Ebb Tide/ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson; Raymond Carver
Khoury, Elias - One Thousand and One Nights; Imru’ al-Qays; Abu Tammam; Adonis; Mahmoud Darwish; And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov
Koch, Kenneth - Frank O’Hara; John Ashbery; William Carlos Williams; Wallace Stevens; Cantos by Ezra Pound
Kundera, Milan - Bohumil Hrabal (“our very best writer today”)
Larkin, Philip - D.H. Lawrence (he considered Lawrence the greatest writer of the twentieth century); Thomas Hardy; George Eliot
Le Carre, John - Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene; Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse
L’Engle, Madeleine - "I loved Emily of New Moon [by L.M. Montgomery]. Lucy Maud Montgomery is better known for her 'Anne' books, but I loved Emily. Emily wanted to be a writer; Emily saw the transcendence, so she was definitely a hero who allowed me to be different!"
Le Guin, Ursula K. - Kim by Rudyard Kipling; A Dreamer’s Tales by Lord Dunsany; Sarah Canary; Blindness by Jose Saramago; Virginia Woolf (her favorite writer); Patrick O'Brian; Charles Dickens; Mark Twain; Jorge Luis Borges; Jane Austen; Claude Levi-Strauss; Clifford Geertz; Paul Goodman; China Mieville; Lao Tzu; Chuang Tzu; Philip K. Dick (who she calls “our own homegrown Borges”)
Lessing, Doris - Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Lewis, C.S. - The Lord of the Flies by William Golding; The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien; Charles Williams; George MacDonald
Litt, Toby - A Study In Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Dead Clever by Scarlett Thomas; The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson; The Big Lebowski by Ethan and Joel Coen; A Philosophical Investigation by Philip Kerr; Double Indemnity by James M. Cain; Cruel and Unusual by Patricia Cornwell; Brighton Rock by Graham Greene; The Ipcress File by Len Deighton; The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark (top ten crime novels)
Lively, Penelope - Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov; The Inheritors by William Golding
Lowry, Lois -"The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawling was a landmark in my life as a reader and writer: It was while listening to that novel that I realized that the words of a book could stir intense emotions."
McCarthy, Cormac - Moby Dick by Herman Melville (his favorite novel)
Macguire, Gregory - The Once and Future King by T.H. White; Unleaving by Jill Paton Walsh; The Towers of the Trebizond by Rose Macaulay; The Diamond in the Window by Jane Langton; Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald; Morality Play by Barry Unsworth; Howards End by E.M. Forster; To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf - “I might have chosen Mrs. Dalloway, or The Waves, or even Between the Acts as my favorite, but To the Lighthouse is my selection mostly because it was in reading this novel (not my first Woolf experience) that I first realized the range and nature of her genius”; Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh; The Children of Knowe by L.M. Boston
McEwan, Ian - Rabbit at Rest by John Updike; Herzog by Saul Bellow; The Wapshot Chronicles by John Cheever; Money by Martin Amis; Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter; Shame by Salman Rushdie; Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes; Franz Kafka; Evelyn Waugh
Manguel, Alberto - Jorge Luis Borges; Robert Louis Stevenson; Colette
Marias, Javier - Joseph Conrad; William Faulkner; Henry James; Rudyard Kipling; Lawrence Sterne; Vladimir Nabokov; Lawrence Durrell; Sir Thomas Browne
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia - see Garcia Marquez, Gabriel
Maso, Carole - Black Tickets by Jayne Ann Philips; Dictee by Theresa Cha; My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe; Les Guerilleres by Monique Wittig; Dante Aligheri; Miguel de Cervantes; Herman Melville; Stephane Mallarme; Gustave Flaubert; Marcel Proust; Franz Kafka; Samuel Beckett; Wallace Stevens; Vladimir Nabokov; Italo Calvino; Ernest Hemingway; Helene Cixous; Patti Smith; Adrienne Rich; Toni Morrison; Doris Lessing; Janet Kauffman; Jorie Graham (“one of the very best writers in this country”); Voyage to Cythera by Theo Angelopoulos
Maugham, W. Somerset - Jonathan Swift
Melville, Herman - Nathaniel Hawthorne; James Fenimore Cooper
Merwin, W.S. - Ezra Pound
Michaels, Anne - John Berger
Mieville, China - The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison; Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake; Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll; The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick; The Dark Domain by Stefan Grabinski; Strange Evil by Jane Gaskell; Une Semaine de Bonte by Max Ernst; Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë; Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link (top ten weird fiction)
Mills, Magnus - Working for Ford by Huw Benyon; Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad; Typhoon by Joseph Conrad; The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien; Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake; Piggly Plays Truant by A.J. McGregor and W. Perring; The Specialist by Charles 'Chic' Sale; South by Sir Ernest Shackleton; English History 1914-1945 by A.J.P. Taylor; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
Moorcock, Michael - Greybeard by Brian W. Aldiss; The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard; The Knights of the Limits by Barrington Bayley (Wildwood e-book); 334 by Thomas M. Disch; The Female Man by Joanna Russ; Tiger! Tiger! by Alfred Bester; The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick; The Space Merchants by Frederich Pohl; Roderick at Random by John Sladek; The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Maurice Richardson (top ten science fiction)
Morrison, Toni - Virginia Woolf; Leo Tolstoy; Feodor Dostoevsky; Jane Austen; Gustave Flaubert; James Baldwin; P.D. James
Motion, Andrew - Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems by John Keats; Poems, Chiefly Lyrical by Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman; North of Boston by Robert Frost; Poems by Edward Thomas; Poems by W.H. Auden; The Less Deceived by Philip Larkin; North by Seamus Heaney; Complete Poems by Elizabeth Bishop
Murakami, Haruki - Kazuo Ishiguro; Ursula K. Le Guin; Raymond Carver; Raymond Chandler; Carl Jung
Munro, Alice - “When I was young it was Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee. Then Updike, Cheever, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Taylor, and especially and forever, William Maxwell. Also William Trevor, Edna O'Brien, Richard Ford. These I would say are influences. There are dozens of others I just like to read. My latest discovery is a Dutch writer, Cees Nooteboom. I hate doing lists like this because I'll be banging my head soon that I left somebody wonderful out.”
Murdoch, Iris - Leo Tolstoy; Feodor Dostoevsky; Ludwig Wittgenstein (whom she studied under); Patrick O’Brian
Nabokov, Vladimir - Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (his favorite book in later life, replacing Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. He paid homage to this shift in the first and last sentences of Ada); Ulysses by James Joyce; Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (his two favorite twentieth-century novels); “Lady with a Lapdog” (“one of the greatest love stories ever written”); Charles Dickens; Robert Louis Stevenson; Franz Kafka; Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll; Evgeny Onegin by Alexander Pushkin (he translated these last two into Russian)
Naipaul, V.S. - Joseph Conrad; R.K. Narayan; Charles Dickens
Nin, Anais - D.H. Lawrence; Henry Miller
O’Brian, Patrick - Jane Austen; Henry Fielding
O’Brien, Edna - James Joyce; William Faulkner (favorite authors); Flann O’Brien; Embers/ The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
O’Brien, Tim - Heart of Darkness/ Lord Jim/ Nostromo/ Typhoon/ “Youth” by Joseph Conrad; Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain; Jorge Luis Borges; Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Okri, Ben - Leo Tolstoy; Charles Dickens
Oludhe-Macgoye, Marjorie - “The Four Quartets” by T.S. Eliot; Joyce Cary; Possession by A.S. Byatt; “Song of Lawino” by Okot p’Bitek; Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
Ondaatje, Michael - Translations by W.S. Merwin; Kim by Rudyard Kipling; Endless Love by Scott Spencer; The Leopard by Lampedusa; Underworld by Don DeLillo; Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone; Children of Light; Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino; Ondaatje has stated that he would “pick up and read anything by John Berger.”; James Hamilton-Paterson
Orwell, George - Jonathan Swift; Leo Tolstoy; Emile Zola
Palahniuk, Chuck - Bret Easton Ellis; Joan Didion's essays ("so much of my fiction is so much like essays"); Irvine Welsh; Thom Jones; Amy Hempel
Pamuk, Orhan - Dante Aligheri; Ulysses by James Joyce
Patchett, Ann -The Human Stain by Philip Roth; One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov; Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy; The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann; The Rabbit Angstrom novels by John Updike; Random Family by Andrian Nocole LeBlanc; Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy; The Good Solider by Ford Madox Ford; Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West
Patterson, Katherine - "The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett by affected me at eight. The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, which was my favorite at eleven/twelve, certainly influenced me. I loved Kate Seredy, Robert Lawson, Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Heidi."
Pavic, Milorad -Tesla; Pupin; Mileva Einstein; Ivo Andric; Charles Simic; Danilo Ki; Makaveyev; Vasko Popa; Vlada Divac; Jorge Luis Borges; The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas; Stratis Tsirkas
Plath, Sylvia - Dylan Thomas; W.H. Auden; Richard Sassoon; Robert Lowell; Anne Sexton; George Starbuck; Ted Hughes
Potok, Chaim - Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (these two books inspired him to write); Feodor Dostoevsky
Pound, Ezra - Ulysses by James Joyce (“the nearest thing to Flaubertian prose that we now have in English”); T.S. Eliot; Li Po
Pritchett, V.S - Henry Green ("The most gifted prose writer of his generation.")
Proulx, Annie - Billy Collins
Proust, Marcel - John Ruskin; George Sand, Anatole France (who encouraged his first literary efforts); Pierre Loti
Pynchon, Thomas - His influences include: "Kerouac and the Beat writers, the diction of Saul Bellow, emerging voices like those of Herbert Gold and Philip Roth."; T.S. Eliot
Rice, Anne - Firestarter/ The Shining by Stephen King; The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens; The Little Friend by Donna Tartt; Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte; Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte; Beloved by Toni Morrison; Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy; The Persian Boy by Mary Renault; The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers; Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. See also www.annerice.com
Rilke, Rainer Maria - Jens Peter Jacobsen
Roth, Philip - Saul Bellow
Robinson, Marilynne - Karl Barth; Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Emily Dickinson; John Donne; Ralph Waldo Emerson; William Faulkner; George Herbert; Herman Melville; Wallace Stevens; Henry David Thoreau; William Carlos Williams; The Book Against God by James Wood; Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rowling, J.K. - "The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge was my favorite childhood book. I absolutely adored it. It had a cracking plot. It was scary and romantic in parts and had a feisty heroine."; The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis; The Once and Future King by T.H. White
Rushdie, Salman - Angela Carter (“The most brilliant writer in England.”); James Joyce (“he shows you that you can do anything if you do it properly”); The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass (“Grass's great novel said to me . . . Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets.”)
Authors A - I
Authors S - Z
Joyce, James - “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway (“One of the best stories ever written.”); he “read every line” of only three authors: Henrik Ibsen, Ben Jonson, and Gustave Flaubert; Les Lauriers sont Coupes by Dujardin (he credited this book with inspiring his stream-of-consciousness style); Dante Aligheri; Thomas Aquinas; Vico; Giordano Bruno; At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien
Kennedy, A.L. - The Dark by John McGahern; Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson; That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis; Sergeant Getulio by Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro; Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov; Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë; Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut; The Confidence Man by Herman Melville; Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes; The Beach at Falesa/ The Ebb Tide/ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson; Raymond Carver
Khoury, Elias - One Thousand and One Nights; Imru’ al-Qays; Abu Tammam; Adonis; Mahmoud Darwish; And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov
Koch, Kenneth - Frank O’Hara; John Ashbery; William Carlos Williams; Wallace Stevens; Cantos by Ezra Pound
Kundera, Milan - Bohumil Hrabal (“our very best writer today”)
Larkin, Philip - D.H. Lawrence (he considered Lawrence the greatest writer of the twentieth century); Thomas Hardy; George Eliot
Le Carre, John - Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene; Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse
L’Engle, Madeleine - "I loved Emily of New Moon [by L.M. Montgomery]. Lucy Maud Montgomery is better known for her 'Anne' books, but I loved Emily. Emily wanted to be a writer; Emily saw the transcendence, so she was definitely a hero who allowed me to be different!"
Le Guin, Ursula K. - Kim by Rudyard Kipling; A Dreamer’s Tales by Lord Dunsany; Sarah Canary; Blindness by Jose Saramago; Virginia Woolf (her favorite writer); Patrick O'Brian; Charles Dickens; Mark Twain; Jorge Luis Borges; Jane Austen; Claude Levi-Strauss; Clifford Geertz; Paul Goodman; China Mieville; Lao Tzu; Chuang Tzu; Philip K. Dick (who she calls “our own homegrown Borges”)
Lessing, Doris - Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Lewis, C.S. - The Lord of the Flies by William Golding; The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien; Charles Williams; George MacDonald
Litt, Toby - A Study In Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Dead Clever by Scarlett Thomas; The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson; The Big Lebowski by Ethan and Joel Coen; A Philosophical Investigation by Philip Kerr; Double Indemnity by James M. Cain; Cruel and Unusual by Patricia Cornwell; Brighton Rock by Graham Greene; The Ipcress File by Len Deighton; The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark (top ten crime novels)
Lively, Penelope - Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov; The Inheritors by William Golding
Lowry, Lois -"The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawling was a landmark in my life as a reader and writer: It was while listening to that novel that I realized that the words of a book could stir intense emotions."
McCarthy, Cormac - Moby Dick by Herman Melville (his favorite novel)
Macguire, Gregory - The Once and Future King by T.H. White; Unleaving by Jill Paton Walsh; The Towers of the Trebizond by Rose Macaulay; The Diamond in the Window by Jane Langton; Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald; Morality Play by Barry Unsworth; Howards End by E.M. Forster; To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf - “I might have chosen Mrs. Dalloway, or The Waves, or even Between the Acts as my favorite, but To the Lighthouse is my selection mostly because it was in reading this novel (not my first Woolf experience) that I first realized the range and nature of her genius”; Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh; The Children of Knowe by L.M. Boston
McEwan, Ian - Rabbit at Rest by John Updike; Herzog by Saul Bellow; The Wapshot Chronicles by John Cheever; Money by Martin Amis; Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter; Shame by Salman Rushdie; Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes; Franz Kafka; Evelyn Waugh
Manguel, Alberto - Jorge Luis Borges; Robert Louis Stevenson; Colette
Marias, Javier - Joseph Conrad; William Faulkner; Henry James; Rudyard Kipling; Lawrence Sterne; Vladimir Nabokov; Lawrence Durrell; Sir Thomas Browne
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia - see Garcia Marquez, Gabriel
Maso, Carole - Black Tickets by Jayne Ann Philips; Dictee by Theresa Cha; My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe; Les Guerilleres by Monique Wittig; Dante Aligheri; Miguel de Cervantes; Herman Melville; Stephane Mallarme; Gustave Flaubert; Marcel Proust; Franz Kafka; Samuel Beckett; Wallace Stevens; Vladimir Nabokov; Italo Calvino; Ernest Hemingway; Helene Cixous; Patti Smith; Adrienne Rich; Toni Morrison; Doris Lessing; Janet Kauffman; Jorie Graham (“one of the very best writers in this country”); Voyage to Cythera by Theo Angelopoulos
Maugham, W. Somerset - Jonathan Swift
Melville, Herman - Nathaniel Hawthorne; James Fenimore Cooper
Merwin, W.S. - Ezra Pound
Michaels, Anne - John Berger
Mieville, China - The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison; Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake; Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll; The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick; The Dark Domain by Stefan Grabinski; Strange Evil by Jane Gaskell; Une Semaine de Bonte by Max Ernst; Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë; Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link (top ten weird fiction)
Mills, Magnus - Working for Ford by Huw Benyon; Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad; Typhoon by Joseph Conrad; The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien; Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake; Piggly Plays Truant by A.J. McGregor and W. Perring; The Specialist by Charles 'Chic' Sale; South by Sir Ernest Shackleton; English History 1914-1945 by A.J.P. Taylor; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
Moorcock, Michael - Greybeard by Brian W. Aldiss; The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard; The Knights of the Limits by Barrington Bayley (Wildwood e-book); 334 by Thomas M. Disch; The Female Man by Joanna Russ; Tiger! Tiger! by Alfred Bester; The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick; The Space Merchants by Frederich Pohl; Roderick at Random by John Sladek; The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Maurice Richardson (top ten science fiction)
Morrison, Toni - Virginia Woolf; Leo Tolstoy; Feodor Dostoevsky; Jane Austen; Gustave Flaubert; James Baldwin; P.D. James
Motion, Andrew - Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems by John Keats; Poems, Chiefly Lyrical by Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman; North of Boston by Robert Frost; Poems by Edward Thomas; Poems by W.H. Auden; The Less Deceived by Philip Larkin; North by Seamus Heaney; Complete Poems by Elizabeth Bishop
Murakami, Haruki - Kazuo Ishiguro; Ursula K. Le Guin; Raymond Carver; Raymond Chandler; Carl Jung
Munro, Alice - “When I was young it was Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee. Then Updike, Cheever, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Taylor, and especially and forever, William Maxwell. Also William Trevor, Edna O'Brien, Richard Ford. These I would say are influences. There are dozens of others I just like to read. My latest discovery is a Dutch writer, Cees Nooteboom. I hate doing lists like this because I'll be banging my head soon that I left somebody wonderful out.”
Murdoch, Iris - Leo Tolstoy; Feodor Dostoevsky; Ludwig Wittgenstein (whom she studied under); Patrick O’Brian
Nabokov, Vladimir - Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (his favorite book in later life, replacing Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. He paid homage to this shift in the first and last sentences of Ada); Ulysses by James Joyce; Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (his two favorite twentieth-century novels); “Lady with a Lapdog” (“one of the greatest love stories ever written”); Charles Dickens; Robert Louis Stevenson; Franz Kafka; Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll; Evgeny Onegin by Alexander Pushkin (he translated these last two into Russian)
Naipaul, V.S. - Joseph Conrad; R.K. Narayan; Charles Dickens
Nin, Anais - D.H. Lawrence; Henry Miller
O’Brian, Patrick - Jane Austen; Henry Fielding
O’Brien, Edna - James Joyce; William Faulkner (favorite authors); Flann O’Brien; Embers/ The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
O’Brien, Tim - Heart of Darkness/ Lord Jim/ Nostromo/ Typhoon/ “Youth” by Joseph Conrad; Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain; Jorge Luis Borges; Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Okri, Ben - Leo Tolstoy; Charles Dickens
Oludhe-Macgoye, Marjorie - “The Four Quartets” by T.S. Eliot; Joyce Cary; Possession by A.S. Byatt; “Song of Lawino” by Okot p’Bitek; Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
Ondaatje, Michael - Translations by W.S. Merwin; Kim by Rudyard Kipling; Endless Love by Scott Spencer; The Leopard by Lampedusa; Underworld by Don DeLillo; Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone; Children of Light; Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino; Ondaatje has stated that he would “pick up and read anything by John Berger.”; James Hamilton-Paterson
Orwell, George - Jonathan Swift; Leo Tolstoy; Emile Zola
Palahniuk, Chuck - Bret Easton Ellis; Joan Didion's essays ("so much of my fiction is so much like essays"); Irvine Welsh; Thom Jones; Amy Hempel
Pamuk, Orhan - Dante Aligheri; Ulysses by James Joyce
Patchett, Ann -The Human Stain by Philip Roth; One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov; Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy; The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann; The Rabbit Angstrom novels by John Updike; Random Family by Andrian Nocole LeBlanc; Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy; The Good Solider by Ford Madox Ford; Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West
Patterson, Katherine - "The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett by affected me at eight. The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, which was my favorite at eleven/twelve, certainly influenced me. I loved Kate Seredy, Robert Lawson, Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Heidi."
Pavic, Milorad -Tesla; Pupin; Mileva Einstein; Ivo Andric; Charles Simic; Danilo Ki; Makaveyev; Vasko Popa; Vlada Divac; Jorge Luis Borges; The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas; Stratis Tsirkas
Plath, Sylvia - Dylan Thomas; W.H. Auden; Richard Sassoon; Robert Lowell; Anne Sexton; George Starbuck; Ted Hughes
Potok, Chaim - Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (these two books inspired him to write); Feodor Dostoevsky
Pound, Ezra - Ulysses by James Joyce (“the nearest thing to Flaubertian prose that we now have in English”); T.S. Eliot; Li Po
Pritchett, V.S - Henry Green ("The most gifted prose writer of his generation.")
Proulx, Annie - Billy Collins
Proust, Marcel - John Ruskin; George Sand, Anatole France (who encouraged his first literary efforts); Pierre Loti
Pynchon, Thomas - His influences include: "Kerouac and the Beat writers, the diction of Saul Bellow, emerging voices like those of Herbert Gold and Philip Roth."; T.S. Eliot
Rice, Anne - Firestarter/ The Shining by Stephen King; The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens; The Little Friend by Donna Tartt; Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte; Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte; Beloved by Toni Morrison; Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy; The Persian Boy by Mary Renault; The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers; Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. See also www.annerice.com
Rilke, Rainer Maria - Jens Peter Jacobsen
Roth, Philip - Saul Bellow
Robinson, Marilynne - Karl Barth; Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Emily Dickinson; John Donne; Ralph Waldo Emerson; William Faulkner; George Herbert; Herman Melville; Wallace Stevens; Henry David Thoreau; William Carlos Williams; The Book Against God by James Wood; Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rowling, J.K. - "The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge was my favorite childhood book. I absolutely adored it. It had a cracking plot. It was scary and romantic in parts and had a feisty heroine."; The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis; The Once and Future King by T.H. White
Rushdie, Salman - Angela Carter (“The most brilliant writer in England.”); James Joyce (“he shows you that you can do anything if you do it properly”); The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass (“Grass's great novel said to me . . . Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets.”)
Authors A - I
Authors S - Z