Famous Authors On Their Favorite Books

"One of my go-to novels for inspiration as a writer. It never fails to amaze me." - Judy Blume for The Strand Bookstore

"It is the ultimate detective novel, and frankly not just detective novel. I think it’s one of the best novels, period… Here’s this writer, here’s Hammett, who in 217 pages creates this world with four of the absolutely most vivid characters that literature, I think, has ever come up with." - Erik Larson in The Wall Street Journal

"This book should NOT have worked, but it does. It's a deeply melancholy novel, but beautifully written, and wonderfully elegiac...a book that I will long remember, and return to." - From George R. R. Martin's Livejournal

"Perhaps my favourite novel? Re-read it after 25 years and was stunned by its incandescent power. Helped immensely with rethinking how to calibrate fantastic effects, which came in handy with The Underground Railroad." - Colson Whitehead in CBC

"A meditation on mortality or what it means to be alive...[Le Guin] is at this moment the grande dame of female science fiction writers in the United States." - Margaret Atwood in The Wall Street Journal

"I read and thought about this Great American Novel everywhere I went — I pictured the Iowa countryside as I rode on a train through Italy. I recommended the book to a stranger in a Hammersmith pub, and she later wrote me to say she had read and loved it." - J. Courtney Sullivan in TIME

"The first book that made me feel powerfully seen. I’d grown up with a claustrophobic despair over being female that I couldn’t really name. That book gave me the words, and turned my despair into an engine that’s been running ever since." - Barbara Kingsolver in Elle

"I loved their emotional richness, their complicated plots, the beauty of their language and their distinct sense of place, all of them at least partly set in South Carolina…I haven’t read Pat Conroy since, but I still feel grateful for how his stories transported me away from myself." - Curtis Sittenfeld in TIME

"It's one of the greatest stories in history. Henry VIII. There's hardly a better tale of intrigue. It's sex and politics and power and madness and violence. It's "Game of Thrones." It's got everything that you could possibly want." - Elizabeth Gilbert in The Wall Street Journal

"Her syntactical inventiveness, her lexical surprises, her merciless yet somehow compassionate sense of humor, her absolute earnestness that never falls into didacticism, her commitment (in her words) to “that great cold elemental grace that knows us” make Williams one of the most important authors writing today." - Hernan Diaz in The New York Times