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Ed Park
I continually drift back into the orbit of Charles Portis, returning especially to The Dog of the South and True Grit, alongside Nicholson Baker’s U and I, Renata Adler’s Speedboat, and the intriguing work known as The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyöng. I also wander into the writings of W.G. Sebald, with a preference for The Rings of Saturn. Recently my reading drift has carried me toward the thirteenth‑century Korean anthology Samguk Yusa, a treasure trove of ancient lore.
I recently revisited The Catcher in the Rye and Breakfast of Champions. Only now, upon rereading, did I sense the profound sadness that lies beneath them, a depth I hadn’t understood when I first encountered these books as a younger reader.
Amit Chadhuri
Over the past decade and a half I have repeatedly revisited two works I first encountered as a teenager in English translation and then set aside: the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. I approach them not as devotional texts but as early instances where imaginative writing and rigorous thought fuse, marking milestones for modernist sensibilities. I also sometimes return to the Irish critic-poet Tom Paulin’s collection of critical essays, Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State, whose astute and lively readings of poets such as John Clare and Elizabeth Bishop never fail to stimulate.
And I keep returning to Paulin’s renderings—closer to Lowell’s “imitations” than to strict translation—of mostly European verse in The Road to Inver, especially the Paul Verlaine poem “Bournemouth,” which, in Paulin’s version, speaks to me on many levels. Tagore’s songs—so exquisitely rendered in Bengali—reappear whenever I sing them from Gitabitan or the Collected Songs. I return to a handful of Woolf’s essays in full; passages from Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas and The Enigma of Arrival reward repeated reading as well.
Jamel Brinkley
Right now I’m in a habit of rereading The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard and Angels by Denis Johnson. Transit impresses with its enormous scope and its knack for oscillating between the intimate and the sweeping, all wrapped in a carefully wrought structure. Angels isn’t as architecturally formal, yet its odd impulses and trajectories feel deeply compelling. Both volumes boast remarkable prose. My general pattern of rereading fiction tends to include Toni Morrison’s Sula, Edward P. Jones’s two short‑story collections, and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.
Kevin Kwan
Evelyn Waugh’s novels hold a perennial charm for me, especially Brideshead Revisited and Decline and Fall. With each reading they become richer and wittier, and I come to value not only what a literary genius he was as a satirist but also the beauty of his prose and the vivid sense of place he creates. Dominick Dunne’s novels also figure prominently in my rereading. I read People Like Us when it first came out in the late eighties, and his glamorous depictions of New York society drew me to move there in the first place.
After a few years living in Manhattan among that milieu, I came to recognize how astute a observer of human behavior he is, and rereading that book shed new light on that entire circle. I feel the same shift when I revisit An Inconvenient Woman, which serves as Dunne’s ode to Los Angeles. Living in Los Angeles deepened my perception of the city’s overlapping networks of influence and helped me understand why it functions so uniquely. Reading it again recently brought to light another revealing facet of Hollywood history—about a notorious murder.
Miranda July
I keep returning to Alice Munro’s stories, reading them again and again. When you reach the line about “too much joy” in All Fours, recognize it as my way of acknowledging the gift she has given me as a writer and to the book itself. She passed away at a wonderfully advanced age on the day All Fours appeared, which, of course, is meaningless in itself, except that I ended up crying in a taxi in New York at a moment I had expected to feel only happiness. That, in a word, is very Munro.
Kathryn Davis
Lately my impulse is almost entirely to reread, to chart who I am now rather than who I was when I first encountered a work like Wuthering Heights. It seems romance dominated my thoughts then (would Cathy and Heathcliff ever pursue a union?), whereas more recently I’ve become intrigued by Emily Brontë’s reflections on the human cost that romance exacts on the psyche.
Anne Carson
Homer’s Iliad.
