Joy Williams's Reading List

"Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and Platonov's Chevengur."

"Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and Platonov's Chevengur. I've discovered Platonov's short fiction, too, collected in Soul."

"I've discovered Platonov's short fiction, too, collected in Soul, for which the co-translator Robert Chandler has provided an excellent introduction. The work is fresh, sorrowful, calmly strange."

"More recently a friend gave me a Faber & Faber edition of Crow, by Ted Hughes. What songs Crow sings. Deeply, deeply un-Whitmanesque."

"Jim Gauer's Novel Explosives. Brainy, brutal, cyclonic."