Your Favorite Authors Reveal: "The Book I’m Addicted To"

“The Speed Queen by Stewart O’Nan!”
—Sue Grafton, author of Kinsey and Me: Stories

“Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy. I read it last year for the first time and, wow, is it ever great. Maybe the darkest and truest and most terrifying book I’ve ever read. It takes a particular view of life on earth that we normally flinch from. It looks at the world from the point of view of those who are truly crapped upon—the poor, the criminal, the insane—and then it walks alongside those people in an absolutely unflinching way. Gradually, as a reader, you start to say: Yikes, yes, Leo, you are right. You are a fanatic and unsubtle, but you are right, and are doing so in service of a great truth: This world is intolerably cruel to the weak. And that realization gets under your skin and stays there. It’s kind of like walking by a crazy ranting person on the street, and you pause—and suddenly you see that, though the method of delivery is rough and refuses to play by the rules of polite discourse, what the person is saying is right on the money. And the truths he tells—about the legal system, the prison system, about the actual process of trying to intervene and do good—still absolutely hold, and maybe more so.”
—George Saunders, author of The Tenth of December

Yusef Komunyakaa's Magic City is what I always come back to. I've been reading and rereading this book of poetry since it was published in 1992. Childhood is the magic city referred to in the title, and I've never come across anything that captures the beauty and power of a child's imagination, or the terror and confusion of being a small person confronted with adult troubles, in the same way. These poems are stunning; this book never stops teaching me about the sound and rhythm of language.
—Ayana Mathis, author of Oprah's Book Club 2.0's second selection The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

“Nabokov’s Pale Fire—for its tour de force lyric elegance, a 999-line poem written in four cantos.”
—A.M. Homes, author of May We All Be Forgiven

“I have re-read The Great Gatsby and The Cider House Rules a lot. Few writers understood as well as Scott Fitzgerald the connection between class and culture and the human heart. Few writers give us characters as consistently idiosyncratic and eccentric as John Irving.”
—Chris Bohjalian, author of The Sandcastle Girls

“Any Jane Austen, anytime.”
—Emma Donoghue, author of Room and Astray

“I re-read Middlemarch by George Eliot, every few years. It's very modern, although published in 1874, and very female, as it was actually written by a woman using a pseudonym. It's brilliant, one of history's greatest novels, and an EASY read—a page turner.”
—Anne Lamott, author of Help, Thanks, Wow

“What A Carve Up! by the British novelist Jonathan Coe. It taught me how the world is a clash of comedy and horror, tenderness and exploitation, how decisions made on high trickle down to shape us all.”
—Jon Ronson, author of Men Who Stare at Goats

“Anything by Edith Wharton. It's astonishing how fresh and contemporary all her novels remain.”
—Meg Wolitzer, author of The Uncoupling

“Neil Gaiman's Sandman chronicles. The first time I found it, I felt like I could feel my mind changing in such unusual ways. I still love re-reading it. It's like visiting old friends.”
—Jenny Lawson, author of Let's Pretend This Never Happened

“The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard. The honest voice of this writer, coupled with her intellect, make this one—and her book The Great Fire as well—worthy of re-reading tome and again. There is always something new surfacing.”
—Lowis Lowry, author of The Son

“The Movie Goer by Walker Percy. The New Orleans stockbroker Binx Boling could not be less like me and yet somehow I never cease to identify with his particular brand of yearning.”
—Hannah Rosin, author of The End of Men

Next: 11 books to devour on a long flight