Sigrid Nunez's Reading List

"Reading and rereading these poems by Bashō, Buson, Issa and other Japanese masters is a kind of meditation for me."

"This is one of those rare books that meet Kafka's ideal of what a book should be: "An ax for the frozen sea within us." It also meets Nabokov's concise definition of art: "Beauty plus pity.""

"Most of these 44 stories are only a few pages long. The characters are ordinary but dysfunctional small-town folks who find themselves in various ridiculous or confounding predicaments, and the narrative style is a highly appealing American plain talk."

"Ginzburg thought "The Road to the City," her first work, might also have been her best one. Her translator agrees and maybe I will, too."