“Good books are stunning charges of vital energy” —Elena Ferrante

If you’re a young woman who wants to write fiction, it’s useful to read zeitgeist-y contemporary writers like Sally Rooney, Ottessa Moshfegh, Elena Ferrante, and Mary Gaitskill—but you’d be missing a great deal by not reading Clarice Lispector and Edith Wharton.

While finishing the book, I wrote to a novelist friend and asked him whether I sounded naïve in my approach. Of course you do, he said, and that’s the only way to write anything in a dying world. In fact, to write any book is an act of practically fanatic devotion, he said, because to write a book is to insist on the possibility of a future in whic... See more

Other books throughout the years kept changing my life in new and exciting ways, usually by changing the way I thought in some meaningful aspect. “Antifragile,” “Letters from a Stoic,” “Finite and Infinite Games,” “Infinite Jest,” “The Denial of Death,” “Words that Work,” “Seeing Like a State,” every now and then I’d pick up a book and come out the... See more