I have so many favorite writers, it's very hard to select a few... of classic writers, I have always admired Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau.
Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader.
I've been so lucky to work with some great, great writers: Tony Kushner and Yasmina Reza.
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.
Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.
Gore Vidal has been a friend of mine for years, and he's one of the greatest writers in American history.
In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve. Andrea is one of them.
Most of my favorite writers are over forty, and so I suppose I'll only name a few of the writers whose work I find myself constantly returning to: Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth.
The name Albert Murray was never household familiar. Yet he was one of the truly original minds of 20th-century American letters.
When I was a child, there were two Nigerian writers in every bookshop: Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.
There must be a dozen films now based on Philip K. Dick novels or stories, far more than any other published science fiction writer. He's sort of become the go-to guy for weird science fiction notions.
I admire Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Strout, D. O. Fagunwa, Sefi Atta, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Colm Toibin and Junot Diaz. It's a long list that keeps growing.
In A Midnight Carol Patricia Davis illuminates the dark and brilliant humanity of Charles Dickens -- the man who lived a rags-to-riches life more remarkable than any of his stories.
