Writers that inspire Craig Mod
Annie Dillard
- She was an essay master
- Check her book on writing, The Writing Life
- Read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Dennis Johnson (Train Dreams)
Lynn Tillman (playful, plays with forms and pushes them, American Genuis Comedy)
Lily Davis
Samuel Johnson (collection of stories)
Anne Carson
Sam Anderson (NYT Magazine, moves Craig deeply)
Writer Poets who became novelists
Michael Andange (Coming to Slaughter)
John Jeremiah Sullivan (essayist, pulsing humor)
Oddessa Maushvage (My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Something from Another World)
Bruce Chautwin (Songlines on Patagonia, travel writing done interestingly)
Lorrie Lee (travel writer)
Helen McDonald
HS Frocke (nonfiction, extremely personal, autobiography but written with pulsing brilliance and curiosity)
Nicholas Baker
Seybald (Austerlitz, Rings of Saturn)
Don Dililow (White Noise, Zero Cake, sentence by sentence goodness)
Philip Roth (Every Man, American Pastoral)
Pico Iyer
William T. Vollman (Riding to Everywhere, writes like a beast)
Joan Didion (essay)
Jenny Oddell (How to Do Nothing, playful academic nonfiction)
James Clear
Robert Carl (Working About Writing)
Jeff Dyer
Ishuo Kaziguro (Remains of the Day)
Anna Burns (Milkman)
Anne Shepard (Living Mom, nature writing done interestingly)
John McPhee (Pine Berries)
Lesley Jamison (essayist, nonfiction, alcoholism)
Jadie Daniels (The Correspondence)
Garth Greenwell (The most literary pornographer)
Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts)
Allen Hilcock (Vault, stories)
Alex Cheek (Tinhouse workshop, Edinborough)
Cormic McCarthy (Blood Meridian) - He worked in silence
James Baldwin
Ocean Vong (On Earth, novel memoir, poets writing novel)
George Saunders (Lincoln in the Bardot, sustaining a tone that you don’t usually encounter)
Peggy Warnstein (essayist, nonficiton)
Nothing Matters
Teju Cole (essays on photography, required for photographers)
James Salter (minimalist ficiton writer)
A River Runs Through It, Norman McClean
Italo Calvino
Pier Peterson (Out Stealing Horses)