"The book that changed me as a teenager Donald Barthelme's Sixty Stories, because he was having such a good time and seemed so so smart, but was also mischievous and irreverent. It may sound corny but these stories made me grasp the existence of a world of art and literature. And Barthelme lived in Houston, where I was growing up, yet he was a major world writer."
"In the early 90s, while I was in graduate school, I read Sigrid Nunez's short story Chang, which later became a portion of her first book, A Feather on the Breath of God. Chang had a seismic effect on me. Up to that point, I can't recall having ever seen a multiracial character in fiction. I was so accustomed to the default whiteness of fictional characters that I didn't even notice the absence of characters from other backgrounds."
My earliest reading memory involved asking my mom to stop reading the bedtime book and let me read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator on my own. Favorite childhood books included Stuart Little and Mary Norton's The Borrowers, fostering a fascination with miniatures and clever small-scale inventions. Donald Barthelme's Sixty Stories conveyed mischief, intelligence, and a sense of a larger literary world while showing that a major literary figure could live locally in Houston. Sigrid Nunez's Chang introduced a multiracial character, disrupting assumptions of default whiteness and prompting reconsideration of character names and cultural specificity.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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