“Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” by Linda Nochlin. “How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art,” by Serge Guilbaut.

“Passages in Modern Sculpture,” by Rosalind E. “The Lives of Artists: Collected Profiles,” by Calvin Tomkins. “Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations,” edited by Clark Coolidge. What books or writers are especially good on the art world? “The Collected Poems,” by Sylvia Plath.Īre there writers you see as especially compatible with your work?Ĭarson McCullers, Mary Shelley, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Nikolai Gogol. “Ukiyo-E: 250 Years of Japanese Art,” by Roni Neuer, Herbert Libertson and Susugu Yoshida. “The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.” “Envelope Poems,” also by Emily Dickinson. “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” by James Joyce. What books, if any, have inspired you in your art? So many, but to name just a few: Hilton Als, Zadie Smith, Alice Munro, Jennifer Egan, Lynn Nottage, Jhumpa Lahiri, Molly Nesbit, Susan Choi, Billy Collins, Rana Dasgupta, Geraldine Brooks, Kazuo Ishiguro, Amitav Ghosh. Which writers - novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets - working today do you admire most?

I’m still struck with the novel’s opening epigraph from Plato, taken from Book 7 of “The Republic”: “Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eye are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind’s eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye.” It’s written in an epistolary style, and I was taken by how the writing itself uses spelling, grammar, punctuation and diction to indicate the rise and loss of the fictive author’s cognitive skills, reflecting the story line.

“Flowers for Algernon,” by Daniel Keyes, was an influential book for me when I was growing up, and I’ve found that few people seem to have read it. What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of? Hinton “The Accursed,” by Joyce Carol Oates.Īre there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?ĭescribe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).Įmily Dickinson, in a hammock, a light breeze, no clocks in sight. Stacked in a tower: “Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt,” edited by Veronica Roberts “If Beale Street Could Talk,” by James Baldwin “Tadao Ando: The Colours of Light,” by Richard Pare “Anni & Josef Albers: Equal and Unequal,” by Nicholas Fox Weber “The Outsiders,” by S.E.

On photography by susan sontag