On Edna O'Brien

What book hasn’t been written that you’d like to read?

The life and loves of the stars, as they float, mingle and collide in the galaxies.

Who would you want to write your life story?

Colum McCann.

What books do you find yourself returning to again and again?

“Heart of Darkness”; “Light in August”; “Out of Africa”; “The Rings of Saturn”; the short stories of Kafka; “Sabbath’s Theater”; “Disgrace”; Virginia Woolf’s letters and diaries; “Ariel,” by Sylvia Plath; the “Collected Poems” of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Czeslaw Milosz, Seamus Heaney, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Wallace Stevens.

What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?

“Don Quixote.”

Read More: New York Times