James Hannaham's Reading List

"Blair is an old friend, but I was a fan of his work before I met him. This book has a lot of the things I've always loved about his writing. It's a hilarious, peculiar and very touching story about a deaf, blind Jehovah's Witness boy and his gay interpreter who try to find the boy's long-lost love together."

"The Candy House is really an incredible feat just formally, a sequel to Goon Squad expanding on that much-lauded work and moving its collective narrative forward; astonishing, even a little bewildering! I know Jenny has a Pulitzer and other awards, but I still feel that she is shockingly underrated."

"Like a lot of my Pratt colleagues, I rely heavily on Oulipo, especially Georges Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, where he sits in one place and tries to write down everything he observes."

"Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, in which Queneau tells the same banal story in 99 different ways, because both of those books naturally lead to some really fun prompts and field trips."

"Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, maybe, a book that really affected the way I think about probability in very positive ways. I thought that book should have been more of a blockbuster."

"The Phantom Tollbooth was formative."