Bending another writer's spine

What some well-known authors are reading for inspiration or diversion

Tom Wolfe, author of "The Right Stuff" and "The Bonfire of the Vanities"

"Currently I'm reading Life on the Hyphen, by Gustavo Perez Firmat. The hyphen in the title is the hyphen in the term 'Cuban-American.' The book has some wonderful descriptions of the tug of war that goes on between the forces on either side of the hyphen."

Mark Doty, author of "Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems"

"I'm reading a terrific first book of poems, Now You're the Enemy, by James Allen Hall. Although Hall is a young poet who feels compelled to write from a turbulent family background, he doesn't believe that straightforward autobiography is a satisfying means of giving shape to his story, so his work is informed by myth, parody, art history, fable, and fantasy. The result is a rich, harrowing, fresh debut."

Walter Mosley,author of "Diablerie" and "The Tempest Tales"

"I've been reading The Coming Race, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, born 1803, an English politician, journalist, playwright, and novelist. The book is one of the earliest examples of adventure-science fiction, by an author who counted Dickens and Disraeli among his admirers. The clarity of his prose, given its fantastic content, is certainly at the root of the genre."

Susan Choi, author of "A Person of Interest"

"The Girls of Slender Means, by Muriel Spark. It's set in a residential hotel in London for unmarried women in 1945, and all the 'girls' are very thin, and their resources are very thin, and the book itself is very thin, just 142 pages. I've managed to make it last through my postpartum reading plan of 2 1/2 pages a night before I pass out from exhaustion. The girls in the book ration everything, too, and they don't even finish their limited dinners so they can all continue to share the same single party dress they take turns with for sexy occasions."

Cynthia Ozick, author of "Dictation: A Quartet"

"I'm currently reading Martin Amis's House of Meetings and rereading, after decades, Lionel Trilling's The Middle of the Journey. I was drawn to the latter because an unfinished -i.e., abandoned - novel by Trilling has recently been discovered, an event in itself, supporting Trilling's belated confession that his most urgent desire, from early on, was to be a novelist, not the critic he became. [Both books,] it turns out, have affinities that are paradoxically opposites: Trilling's novel touches abstractly on the Soviet Union as a political theme, but Amis's is graphically, horribly visceral."

Geraldine Brooks,author of "People of the Book"

"Peter Carey's His Illegal Self . Full of heart and heartbreak. This is Carey at a new emotional pitch, and his imagining of a child's heart and soul is pitch-perfect."

Peter Carey, author of "His Illegal Self"

"The Spare Room, by Helen Garner, who is an Australian writer I always thought to be one of our finest, but her work never appears to have traveled well. It's a novel about a woman of about my age - 64 - with a spare room, and she has a friend who is dying of cancer who comes to stay with her and seek alternate treatment. It's horrifying, but it's very funny, it's very beautiful, it's very moving. She has such a wonderful visual intelligence. She is really something."

Compiled by John Freeman