Salinger took such care with his characters and wrote with such warmth. I like The Catcher in the Rye well enough, but to my mind, Salinger's masterworks were the stories he wrote about the Glass family. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by J.D. It was a direct influence on Station Eleven. The structure in Egan's most recent novel is so fractured that, legend has it, the book was marketed in some territories as a short-story collection. Yet the tension is greatly heightened by his use of multiple points of view and a wildly nonlinear structure.Ī Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Anchor, $16). I believe Await Your Reply, which sends three characters on parallel journeys of reinvention, would be a captivating novel no matter what structure Chaon chose to use. But his book about serial killer Gary Gilmore is a masterpiece, and it changed the way I write.Īwait Your Reply by Dan Chaon (Ballantine, $15). It's almost as if some people confuse the question "Which books influenced you?" with "Which writers do you uncritically adore, and do you also approve of them stabbing their spouses?" I don't like most of the Mailer books that I've read. I get some strange looks when I cite this book as an influence. The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer (Grand Central, $22). Ondaatje's text was revelatory: I think it was the first time I understood how beautiful prose could be. I requested this novel for Christmas when I was 14 or 15. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (Vintage, $16).
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