Authors A - I
Allende, Isabel - One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; A Thousand and One Nights; Pablo Neruda; Henri Troyat; Jorge Luis Borges; Julio Cortazar; Carlos Fuentes; Manuel Puig
Amis, Martin - The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (Amis considers this the great American novel, and Bellow "the greatest American author ever."); Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov; Crash by J.G. Ballard; Paradise Lost by John Milton; Ulysses by James Joyce; Philip Larkin; Will Self
Atwood, Margaret - The Once and Future King (particularly The Sword in the Stone) by T.H. White; Katherine Anne Porter; Ursula K. Le Guin; "Consider Her Ways" by John Wyndham
Auden, W.H. - Henry Green ("The finest living English novelist.")
Auster, Paul - "The Bridge" by Hart Crane ("one of the best twentieth-century poems"); Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes (favorite novel); Samuel Beckett; Knut Hamsun
Bainbridge, Beryl - Sons and Lovers by D.H Lawrence ("the writer who influenced me most"); Francois Mauriac
Baldwin, James - Henry James
Ballard, J.G. - Straw Dogs by John Gray Freud; Franz Kafka; Albert Camus; Aldous Huxley; George Orwell; The Ticket That Exploded/ The Soft Machine/ Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs; J.B. Priestly; Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg; James Hamilton-Paterson
Banville, John - James Joyce; Samuel Beckett; Vladimir Nabokov; Harold Pinter
Barnes, Julian - Gustave Flaubert
Beckett, Samuel - James Joyce; Dante Aligheri; At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien; Augustine; Holderlin; late Yeats
Bellow, Saul - Joseph Conrad
Berendt, John - Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens; Collected Stories by Tennessee Williams; The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton; In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin; The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor; Neuromancer by William Gibson; The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell; Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver; The Aspern Papers by Henry James; The Magic Christian by Terry Southern (top ten)
Berger, John - Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
de Bernieres, Louis - Joseph Conrad
Blume, Judy - "As a preschooler, I discovered Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans at the library. I loved it so much; I didn't want to part with it. In fact, because I thought I had the only copy in the world. I hid the book in my kitchen toy drawer so that my mother wouldn't be able to return it to the library."
Borges, Jorge Luis - Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (favorite novel - Borges calls it "The Quixote"); The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells; the Father Brown stories by G.K. Chesterton; Algernon Charles Swinburne; Percy Bysshe Shelley; John Keats; Alfred, Lord Tennyson (these four were early influences); Sir Thomas Browne ("I love him."); Franz Kafka; "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman; Mark Twain; Ring Lardner; Sanctuary/ Light in August by William Faulkner;
Boyd, William - The Chekhov Omnibus tr. by Constance Garnett; Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Bradbury, Ray - Jules Verne; H.G. Wells; F. Scott Fitzgerald; early John Steinbeck; the short stories of Ernest Hemingway; Eudora Welty; Katherine Anne Porter; Jessamyn West; John Collier ("One of the most important writers of the 20th century, yet most people don't know his name."); Leigh Brackett; F. Scott Fitzgerald ("I go to Paris every July, and I take a copy of Tender Is the Night, and I sit in outdoor restaurants and drink coffee and have a beer, and I read the novel."); Essays by Aldous Huxley; Alexander Pope; George Bernard Shaw
Bradford, Barbara Taylor - Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë; David Copperfield by Charles Dickens; Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier; Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell; Fiesta by Ernest Hemingway; Early Reagan by Anne Edwards; The Grail Quest Series by Bernard Cornwell; The Autobiography of Henry VIII by Margaret George; His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman; The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates (top ten)
Brink, Andre - Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust; The Trial by Franz Kafka; Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset; The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil; Independent People by Haldor Laxness; The Plague by Albert Camus; Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen; The Tin Drum by Gunther Grass; One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; If On A Winter's Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino (top ten international novels)
Bronte, Charlotte - William Thackeray; Robert Southey; Emily Bronte; Anne Bronte
Bronte, Emily - Isaac Watts; Horace Walpole; Charlotte Bronte; Anne Bronte; Percy Bysshe Shelley
Byatt, A.S. - Middlemarch by George Eliot; the Brontes; Jane Austen; Iris Murdoch; Lawrence Norfolk ("the best of the young novelists now writing"); Charles Dickens; The Possessed by Feodor Dostoevsky; Marcel Proust; Honore de Balzac; "The Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; John Milton; John Donne; Emily Dickinson; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Robert Browning; Wallace Stevens; "I had a [Thomas Lovell] Beddoes obsession when I was a student at Cambridge"; Monica Dickens; Ghostwritten by David Mitchell; Kitchen Venom by Phillip Hensher; Hotel World by Ali Smith; The Last Samurai by Helen De Witt; A.L. Kennedy; White Teeth by Zadie Smith; Charles Palliser; Martin Amis; Exquisite Corpse by Robert Irwin; Ghostwritten by David Mitchell ("the best first novel I have ever read")
Burgess, Anthony - Aldous Huxley; Henry Green
Burroughs, William - Allen Ginsberg; Jonathan Swift; Jack Kerouac; Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard
Calvino, Italo - Cesare Pavese; "My author is Kafka, and my favorite novel is Amerika." Ferdinand de Saussure; Roland Barthes; Lawrence Sterne; Thomas Mann; Popeye comics; Jorge Luis Borges
Capote, Truman - "From the point of view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence." Ulysses by James Joyce; "A Simple Heart" by Gustave Flaubert; Noon Wine by Katharine Anne Porter (he considered her one of the finest writers of her time); William Faulkner; Eudora Welty; Carson McCullers; Flaubert; Turgenev; Chekhov; Jane Austen; James; E.M. Forster; Guy de Maupassant; Rainer Maria Rilke; Marcel Proust; George Bernard Shaw; Willa Cather; James Agee; Colette; Mark Twain; Isak Dinesen
Carey, Peter - James Joyce; William Faulkner; Samuel Beckett
Carroll, Lewis - Leibniz; Edward Lear
Carter, Angela - J.G. Ballard; Michael Moorcock; Jorge Luis Borges
Carver, Raymond - Guy de Maupassant; Anton Chekhov; Richard Yates; Flannery O’Connor; Ernest Hemingway; Robert Frost; W.S. Merwin; Jayne Anne Phillips
Chandler, Raymond - Frederick Nebel; Dashiell Hammett
Chatwin, Bruce - Planet and Glowworm by Edith Sitwell
Chaudhuri, Amit - "Suryana Kudure," or "A Horse for the Sun," by U.R. Anantha Murthy; A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul; the poetry of D.H. Lawrence; Walter Benjamin; Kalidasa ("the greatest Indian poet and dramatist of antiquity")
Cleary, Beverly - This House of Sky, Heart Earth by Ivan Doig; Penelope Fitzgerald; Flight of the Maidens by Jane Gardam; Atonement by Ian McEwan
Coelho, Paulo - Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller; A Separate Reality by Carlos Castaneda; Songs of Innocence by William Blake; Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges; The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles; Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon by Jorge Amado; Dialogues by Plato; The Prophet by Khalil Gibran; Fables by La Fontaine; One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (top ten)
Coetzee, J.M. - Franz Kafka; Feodor Dostoevsky
Conrad, Joseph - Sir Walter Scott; James Fenimore Cooper; Charles Dickens; William Makepeace Thackeray; Ford Madox Ford (who collaborated with Conrad on The Inheritors, Romance, and The Nature of a Crime)
Cooper, Jilly - Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen; Middlemarch by George Eliot; A Dog Day by Walter Emmanuel with illustrations by Cecil Alden; The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford; The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins; Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope; The Tale of Mr. Tod by Beatrix Potter; Excellent Women by Barbara Pym; A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell; The Judge's Story by Charles Morgan
Crace, Jim - David Quammen; Barry Lopez; John McPhee
Crichton, Michael - Collected Essays by George Orwell; Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain; Tao Te Ching tr. by Witter Bynner; The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson, "Actually, I recommend anything by Stevenson"; No Boundary by Ken Wilbur; The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier; anything by Mary Midgeley; The End of the Affair by Graham Greene; Be Here Now by Ram Dass; The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber
Cunningham, Michael - Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert; The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann; Death in Venice by Thomas Mann; The Manikin by Joanna Scott; Being Dead by Jim Crace; Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee; The Aspern Papers by Henry James; The Dead by James Joyce; Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor; Open Secrets by Alice Munro
Dahl, Roald - C.S. Forrester (at whose instigation Dahl began writing)
Delany, Samuel - Michael Joyce; Katherine Kramer
DeLillo, Don - William Faulkner; James Joyce; Ezra Pound; Gertrude Stein
Dickinson, Emily - George Eliot; the Brontes; Robert Browning; Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Dinesen, Isak - The Joseph novels by Thomas Mann; The Tempest by William Shakespeare; Chrome Yellow by Aldous Huxley ("it was like biting into an unknown and refreshing fruit"); Mark Twain; E.T.A. Hoffmann; Hans Christian Anderson; Barbey D’Aurevilly; La Motte Fouque; Chamisso; Ivan Turgenev; Ernest Hemingway; Guy de Maupassant; Stendahl; Anton Chekhov; Joseph Conrad; Voltaire; Herman Melville; Walter Scott; Jacques Racine; The Odyssey; The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
Dostoevsky, Feodor - "We have all come out from under Gogol’s overcoat." Sir Walter Scott; Lord Byron; David Copperfield/ The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
Durrell, Lawrence - Alexandria: A History and a Guide by E.M. Forster; Henry Miller; Aldous Huxley; Aldington; Robert Graves; W.H. Auden; Norman Douglas; Lytton Strachey; The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh; T.S. Eliot; "The City," "Ithaca," and "The Barbarians" by Constantine Cavafy
Eliot, George - Thomas Carlyle ("there is hardly an active mind of this generation that has not been modified by Carlyle's writings"); Ruskin; Goethe
Eliot, T.S. - The Black Book by Lawrence Durrell; The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam tr. by Edward Fitzgerald (first inspired him to write poetry); Laforgue; Irving Babbitt; Arthur Rimbaud; Dante Aligheri; Laforgue; Stephane Mallarme; John Donne; Ezra Pound
Faulkner, William - Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina (when asked to name the three greatest novels); Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson; Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann; John Dos Passos; Willa Cather
Fischer, Tibor - The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek; Embers by Sándor Márai; The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn; Ashes and Diamonds by Jerzy Andrzejewski; Omon Ra by Viktor Pelevin; The Transylvanian Trilogy by Miklós Bánffy; The Joke by Milan Kundera; The General of the Dead Army by Ismail Kadare; Memoir of a Russian Punk by Eduard Limonov (top ten Eastern European novels)
Flaubert, Gustave - Voltaire; Zola; George Sand; Ivan Turgenev
Forster, E.M. - Thais by Anatole France (inspired him to try a historical novel). Learned the most from Jane Austen and Marcel Proust. Considered Remembrance of Things Past and War and Peace the finest novels of all time. The Egoist by Meredith; D.H. Lawrence ("The greatest imaginative novelist of our time.")
Fowles, John - Thomas Hardy; D.H. Lawrence
Franzen, Jonathan - Thomas Pynchon; Don DeLillo; William Gaddis; Joseph Heller; John Barth; The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald; Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel - "Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka, tr. by Jorge Luis Borges ("I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago."); Ernest Hemingway; William Faulkner
Gerrard, Nicci - Philip Roth; Sarah Walters; Anne Tyler; Ian McEwan;Margaret Atwood; Helen Dunmore; Ruth Rendell; Pat Barker; Carol Shields;Rose Tremaine; Henning Mankell; John Banville; Jim Crace; Hilary Mantel;The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver; The Death ofHadrian by Marguerite Youcenar; The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx; the Moomintroll books by Tove Jannsson; The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge; Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Gibson, William - Philip K. Dick
Golding, William - Greek tragedy: For fifteen years "I read nothing but classical Greek, not because it was the snobbish thing to do or even the most enjoyable, but because this is where the meat is."; Graham Greene
Gordimer, Nadine - Marcel Proust, Anton Chekhov; Feodor Dostoevsky
Grafton, Sue - "My favorite is Elmore Leonard"; The Speed Queen by Simon Stuart O'nan; The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Green, Henry - "I have a tremendous admiration for Celine."
Greene, Graham - Lolitaby Vladimir Nabokov (Greene’s inclusion of Lolita among his best three novels of 1955 helped boost the novel’s popularity); T.S. Eliot; Herbert Read; Erskine Childers; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold ("the best spy story I have ever read"); At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien
Haddon, Mark - Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen; James Joyce; Virginia Woolf; R.S. Thomas
Hamilton, Jane - Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte; Emma by Jane Austen; The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank; The Diaries of Anne Morrow Lindbergh; Lorrie Moore; Carol Shields; Carol Anshaw; Kevin Canty; Michael Cunningham
Hamilton-Paterson, James - Ed McBain; Mumbo Jumbo: How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen
Hardy, Thomas - John Milton; William Wordsworth; Robert Browning
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - Herman Melville; Anthony Trollope
Heaney, Seamus - Keats; Hopkins; Chaucer; Ted Hughes; Robert Frost; Wilfred Owen
Heller, Joseph - H.L. Mencken, Jerome Weidman, James T. Farrell; William Saroyan
Hemingway, Ernest - Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain ("All American fiction comes from that one book"); Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson; William Faulkner ("I would have loved to be his manager."); Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott; Charles Dickens; A Sportsman’s Sketches by Turgenev; War and Peace/ Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Hornby, Nick - The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
Hosseini, Khaled - The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy; Frankenstein by Mary Shelley; Animal Farm by George Orwell; The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck; I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb; Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov; Life of Pi by Yann Martel; Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides; Being Dead by Jim Crace; The Rubayyiat of Omar Khayyam (top ten)
Hustvedt, Siri - Our Mutual Friend/ David Copperfield by Charles Dickens; Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte; Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Henry James (she was "permanently altered by his books.")
Huxley, Aldous - D.H. Lawrence, Herman Hesse; William Blake
Irving, John - The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (favorite novel); Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (the book he says made him a writer); Nathaniel Hawthorne; George Eliot; Feodor Dostoevsky; Leo Tolstoy; Ivan Turgenev; Anthony Trollope; Günter Grass; Kurt Vonnegut; Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ishiguro, Kazuo - Feodor Dostoevsky; Angela Carter; Jerusalem the Golden by Margaret Drabble (the book that first inspired him to write); V.S. Naipaul; J.G. Farrell; Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
Authors J - R
Authors S - Z
Amis, Martin - The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (Amis considers this the great American novel, and Bellow "the greatest American author ever."); Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov; Crash by J.G. Ballard; Paradise Lost by John Milton; Ulysses by James Joyce; Philip Larkin; Will SelfAtwood, Margaret - The Once and Future King (particularly The Sword in the Stone) by T.H. White; Katherine Anne Porter; Ursula K. Le Guin; "Consider Her Ways" by John Wyndham
Auden, W.H. - Henry Green ("The finest living English novelist.")
Auster, Paul - "The Bridge" by Hart Crane ("one of the best twentieth-century poems"); Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes (favorite novel); Samuel Beckett; Knut Hamsun
Bainbridge, Beryl - Sons and Lovers by D.H Lawrence ("the writer who influenced me most"); Francois Mauriac
Baldwin, James - Henry James
Ballard, J.G. - Straw Dogs by John Gray Freud; Franz Kafka; Albert Camus; Aldous Huxley; George Orwell; The Ticket That Exploded/ The Soft Machine/ Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs; J.B. Priestly; Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg; James Hamilton-Paterson
Banville, John - James Joyce; Samuel Beckett; Vladimir Nabokov; Harold Pinter
Barnes, Julian - Gustave Flaubert
Beckett, Samuel - James Joyce; Dante Aligheri; At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien; Augustine; Holderlin; late Yeats
Bellow, Saul - Joseph Conrad
Berendt, John - Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens; Collected Stories by Tennessee Williams; The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton; In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin; The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor; Neuromancer by William Gibson; The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell; Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver; The Aspern Papers by Henry James; The Magic Christian by Terry Southern (top ten)
Berger, John - Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
de Bernieres, Louis - Joseph Conrad
Blume, Judy - "As a preschooler, I discovered Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans at the library. I loved it so much; I didn't want to part with it. In fact, because I thought I had the only copy in the world. I hid the book in my kitchen toy drawer so that my mother wouldn't be able to return it to the library."
Borges, Jorge Luis - Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (favorite novel - Borges calls it "The Quixote"); The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells; the Father Brown stories by G.K. Chesterton; Algernon Charles Swinburne; Percy Bysshe Shelley; John Keats; Alfred, Lord Tennyson (these four were early influences); Sir Thomas Browne ("I love him."); Franz Kafka; "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman; Mark Twain; Ring Lardner; Sanctuary/ Light in August by William Faulkner;
Boyd, William - The Chekhov Omnibus tr. by Constance Garnett; Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Bradbury, Ray - Jules Verne; H.G. Wells; F. Scott Fitzgerald; early John Steinbeck; the short stories of Ernest Hemingway; Eudora Welty; Katherine Anne Porter; Jessamyn West; John Collier ("One of the most important writers of the 20th century, yet most people don't know his name."); Leigh Brackett; F. Scott Fitzgerald ("I go to Paris every July, and I take a copy of Tender Is the Night, and I sit in outdoor restaurants and drink coffee and have a beer, and I read the novel."); Essays by Aldous Huxley; Alexander Pope; George Bernard Shaw
Bradford, Barbara Taylor - Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë; David Copperfield by Charles Dickens; Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier; Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell; Fiesta by Ernest Hemingway; Early Reagan by Anne Edwards; The Grail Quest Series by Bernard Cornwell; The Autobiography of Henry VIII by Margaret George; His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman; The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates (top ten)
Brink, Andre - Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust; The Trial by Franz Kafka; Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset; The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil; Independent People by Haldor Laxness; The Plague by Albert Camus; Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen; The Tin Drum by Gunther Grass; One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; If On A Winter's Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino (top ten international novels)
Bronte, Charlotte - William Thackeray; Robert Southey; Emily Bronte; Anne Bronte
Bronte, Emily - Isaac Watts; Horace Walpole; Charlotte Bronte; Anne Bronte; Percy Bysshe Shelley
Byatt, A.S. - Middlemarch by George Eliot; the Brontes; Jane Austen; Iris Murdoch; Lawrence Norfolk ("the best of the young novelists now writing"); Charles Dickens; The Possessed by Feodor Dostoevsky; Marcel Proust; Honore de Balzac; "The Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; John Milton; John Donne; Emily Dickinson; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Robert Browning; Wallace Stevens; "I had a [Thomas Lovell] Beddoes obsession when I was a student at Cambridge"; Monica Dickens; Ghostwritten by David Mitchell; Kitchen Venom by Phillip Hensher; Hotel World by Ali Smith; The Last Samurai by Helen De Witt; A.L. Kennedy; White Teeth by Zadie Smith; Charles Palliser; Martin Amis; Exquisite Corpse by Robert Irwin; Ghostwritten by David Mitchell ("the best first novel I have ever read")
Burgess, Anthony - Aldous Huxley; Henry Green
Burroughs, William - Allen Ginsberg; Jonathan Swift; Jack Kerouac; Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard
Calvino, Italo - Cesare Pavese; "My author is Kafka, and my favorite novel is Amerika." Ferdinand de Saussure; Roland Barthes; Lawrence Sterne; Thomas Mann; Popeye comics; Jorge Luis Borges
Capote, Truman - "From the point of view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence." Ulysses by James Joyce; "A Simple Heart" by Gustave Flaubert; Noon Wine by Katharine Anne Porter (he considered her one of the finest writers of her time); William Faulkner; Eudora Welty; Carson McCullers; Flaubert; Turgenev; Chekhov; Jane Austen; James; E.M. Forster; Guy de Maupassant; Rainer Maria Rilke; Marcel Proust; George Bernard Shaw; Willa Cather; James Agee; Colette; Mark Twain; Isak Dinesen
Carey, Peter - James Joyce; William Faulkner; Samuel Beckett
Carroll, Lewis - Leibniz; Edward Lear
Carter, Angela - J.G. Ballard; Michael Moorcock; Jorge Luis Borges
Carver, Raymond - Guy de Maupassant; Anton Chekhov; Richard Yates; Flannery O’Connor; Ernest Hemingway; Robert Frost; W.S. Merwin; Jayne Anne Phillips
Chandler, Raymond - Frederick Nebel; Dashiell Hammett
Chatwin, Bruce - Planet and Glowworm by Edith Sitwell
Chaudhuri, Amit - "Suryana Kudure," or "A Horse for the Sun," by U.R. Anantha Murthy; A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul; the poetry of D.H. Lawrence; Walter Benjamin; Kalidasa ("the greatest Indian poet and dramatist of antiquity")
Cleary, Beverly - This House of Sky, Heart Earth by Ivan Doig; Penelope Fitzgerald; Flight of the Maidens by Jane Gardam; Atonement by Ian McEwan
Coelho, Paulo - Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller; A Separate Reality by Carlos Castaneda; Songs of Innocence by William Blake; Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges; The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles; Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon by Jorge Amado; Dialogues by Plato; The Prophet by Khalil Gibran; Fables by La Fontaine; One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (top ten)
Coetzee, J.M. - Franz Kafka; Feodor Dostoevsky
Conrad, Joseph - Sir Walter Scott; James Fenimore Cooper; Charles Dickens; William Makepeace Thackeray; Ford Madox Ford (who collaborated with Conrad on The Inheritors, Romance, and The Nature of a Crime)
Cooper, Jilly - Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen; Middlemarch by George Eliot; A Dog Day by Walter Emmanuel with illustrations by Cecil Alden; The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford; The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins; Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope; The Tale of Mr. Tod by Beatrix Potter; Excellent Women by Barbara Pym; A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell; The Judge's Story by Charles Morgan
Crace, Jim - David Quammen; Barry Lopez; John McPhee
Crichton, Michael - Collected Essays by George Orwell; Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain; Tao Te Ching tr. by Witter Bynner; The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson, "Actually, I recommend anything by Stevenson"; No Boundary by Ken Wilbur; The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier; anything by Mary Midgeley; The End of the Affair by Graham Greene; Be Here Now by Ram Dass; The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber
Cunningham, Michael - Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert; The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann; Death in Venice by Thomas Mann; The Manikin by Joanna Scott; Being Dead by Jim Crace; Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee; The Aspern Papers by Henry James; The Dead by James Joyce; Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor; Open Secrets by Alice Munro
Dahl, Roald - C.S. Forrester (at whose instigation Dahl began writing)
Delany, Samuel - Michael Joyce; Katherine Kramer
DeLillo, Don - William Faulkner; James Joyce; Ezra Pound; Gertrude Stein
Dickinson, Emily - George Eliot; the Brontes; Robert Browning; Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Dinesen, Isak - The Joseph novels by Thomas Mann; The Tempest by William Shakespeare; Chrome Yellow by Aldous Huxley ("it was like biting into an unknown and refreshing fruit"); Mark Twain; E.T.A. Hoffmann; Hans Christian Anderson; Barbey D’Aurevilly; La Motte Fouque; Chamisso; Ivan Turgenev; Ernest Hemingway; Guy de Maupassant; Stendahl; Anton Chekhov; Joseph Conrad; Voltaire; Herman Melville; Walter Scott; Jacques Racine; The Odyssey; The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
Dostoevsky, Feodor - "We have all come out from under Gogol’s overcoat." Sir Walter Scott; Lord Byron; David Copperfield/ The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
Durrell, Lawrence - Alexandria: A History and a Guide by E.M. Forster; Henry Miller; Aldous Huxley; Aldington; Robert Graves; W.H. Auden; Norman Douglas; Lytton Strachey; The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh; T.S. Eliot; "The City," "Ithaca," and "The Barbarians" by Constantine Cavafy
Eliot, George - Thomas Carlyle ("there is hardly an active mind of this generation that has not been modified by Carlyle's writings"); Ruskin; Goethe
Eliot, T.S. - The Black Book by Lawrence Durrell; The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam tr. by Edward Fitzgerald (first inspired him to write poetry); Laforgue; Irving Babbitt; Arthur Rimbaud; Dante Aligheri; Laforgue; Stephane Mallarme; John Donne; Ezra Pound
Faulkner, William - Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina (when asked to name the three greatest novels); Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson; Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann; John Dos Passos; Willa Cather
Fischer, Tibor - The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek; Embers by Sándor Márai; The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn; Ashes and Diamonds by Jerzy Andrzejewski; Omon Ra by Viktor Pelevin; The Transylvanian Trilogy by Miklós Bánffy; The Joke by Milan Kundera; The General of the Dead Army by Ismail Kadare; Memoir of a Russian Punk by Eduard Limonov (top ten Eastern European novels)
Flaubert, Gustave - Voltaire; Zola; George Sand; Ivan Turgenev
Forster, E.M. - Thais by Anatole France (inspired him to try a historical novel). Learned the most from Jane Austen and Marcel Proust. Considered Remembrance of Things Past and War and Peace the finest novels of all time. The Egoist by Meredith; D.H. Lawrence ("The greatest imaginative novelist of our time.")
Fowles, John - Thomas Hardy; D.H. Lawrence
Franzen, Jonathan - Thomas Pynchon; Don DeLillo; William Gaddis; Joseph Heller; John Barth; The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald; Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel - "Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka, tr. by Jorge Luis Borges ("I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago."); Ernest Hemingway; William Faulkner
Gerrard, Nicci - Philip Roth; Sarah Walters; Anne Tyler; Ian McEwan;Margaret Atwood; Helen Dunmore; Ruth Rendell; Pat Barker; Carol Shields;Rose Tremaine; Henning Mankell; John Banville; Jim Crace; Hilary Mantel;The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver; The Death ofHadrian by Marguerite Youcenar; The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx; the Moomintroll books by Tove Jannsson; The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge; Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Gibson, William - Philip K. Dick
Golding, William - Greek tragedy: For fifteen years "I read nothing but classical Greek, not because it was the snobbish thing to do or even the most enjoyable, but because this is where the meat is."; Graham Greene
Gordimer, Nadine - Marcel Proust, Anton Chekhov; Feodor Dostoevsky
Grafton, Sue - "My favorite is Elmore Leonard"; The Speed Queen by Simon Stuart O'nan; The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Green, Henry - "I have a tremendous admiration for Celine."
Greene, Graham - Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov (Greene’s inclusion of Lolita among his best three novels of 1955 helped boost the novel’s popularity); T.S. Eliot; Herbert Read; Erskine Childers; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold ("the best spy story I have ever read"); At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’BrienHaddon, Mark - Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen; James Joyce; Virginia Woolf; R.S. Thomas
Hamilton, Jane - Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte; Emma by Jane Austen; The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank; The Diaries of Anne Morrow Lindbergh; Lorrie Moore; Carol Shields; Carol Anshaw; Kevin Canty; Michael Cunningham
Hamilton-Paterson, James - Ed McBain; Mumbo Jumbo: How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen
Hardy, Thomas - John Milton; William Wordsworth; Robert Browning
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - Herman Melville; Anthony Trollope
Heaney, Seamus - Keats; Hopkins; Chaucer; Ted Hughes; Robert Frost; Wilfred Owen
Heller, Joseph - H.L. Mencken, Jerome Weidman, James T. Farrell; William Saroyan
Hemingway, Ernest - Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain ("All American fiction comes from that one book"); Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson; William Faulkner ("I would have loved to be his manager."); Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott; Charles Dickens; A Sportsman’s Sketches by Turgenev; War and Peace/ Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Hornby, Nick - The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
Hosseini, Khaled - The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy; Frankenstein by Mary Shelley; Animal Farm by George Orwell; The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck; I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb; Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov; Life of Pi by Yann Martel; Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides; Being Dead by Jim Crace; The Rubayyiat of Omar Khayyam (top ten)
Hustvedt, Siri - Our Mutual Friend/ David Copperfield by Charles Dickens; Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte; Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Henry James (she was "permanently altered by his books.")
Huxley, Aldous - D.H. Lawrence, Herman Hesse; William Blake
Irving, John - The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (favorite novel); Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (the book he says made him a writer); Nathaniel Hawthorne; George Eliot; Feodor Dostoevsky; Leo Tolstoy; Ivan Turgenev; Anthony Trollope; Günter Grass; Kurt Vonnegut; Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ishiguro, Kazuo - Feodor Dostoevsky; Angela Carter; Jerusalem the Golden by Margaret Drabble (the book that first inspired him to write); V.S. Naipaul; J.G. Farrell; Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
Authors J - R
Authors S - Z