Tell us about your favorite short story.

“The Gardener,” by Rudyard Kipling. A mother goes to a large war cemetery on the Western Front in the aftermath of the First World War, looking for the grave of her son. She meets the gardener who is taking care of the cemetery. The sense of vast and unendurable grief is all the more powerful for being expressed with such restraint and economy.

And about your favorite poem.

“The Prelude,” by Wordsworth, or “Paradise Lost,” by Milton. “The Prelude” is part of my bloodstream practically, or maybe I mean metaphorically. Obviously parts of “Paradise Lost” are a total bore, but it’s worth the slog. After reading the scene where Adam and Eve eat the apple (“Carnal desire inflaming, he on Eve / Began to cast lascivious Eyes, she him / As wantonly repaid. . . .”), it’s hard not to concur with Terence McKenna’s claim that the expulsion was the original drug bust. The end is the most beautiful thing in all of literature; as Adam and Eve leave Eden they are us. Oh, and to bring things up-to-date, I love practically every funny, crazy and profound line in “It Is Daylight,” by Arda Collins.

And your favorite play.

“King Lear,” “Macbeth” or maybe “The Tempest.” I will never forget seeing the whole of Prospero’s “Our revels now are ended” speech written on signs, a few phrases at a time, on the way out of Burning Man in 2001. For a while I had this stupid prejudice about going to the theater in London but I’m glad to say I’m over that now (that I no longer live there).

What moves you most in a work of literature?

Appeals to and expressions of solidarity. I am still moved by passages of Marx: the “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” for example, where, after the famous line about religion being “the opium of the people,” he goes on to call it “the heart of a heartless world.” The single most moving passage I know is in “The Country and the City,” by Raymond Williams, where he looks at the big English country houses, describing their great beauty before adding, “Think it through as labor.” He then proceeds to do just that, reminding us of how long and systematic the exploitation and fraud must have been to have raised “that many houses, on that scale. See by contrast what any ancient isolated farm, in uncounted generations of labor, has managed to become, by the efforts of any single real family.” I also found much that was moving in “All on Fire,” Henry Mayer’s biography of William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist editor of The Liberator. Last fall, in the Beinecke Library at Yale, I was able to see an original copy of the first issue of The Liberator (January 1831) with its famous editorial: “I will not equivocate — I will not excuse —I will not retreat a single inch — and I will be heard.” I was worried that the page might become tear-damaged as I looked at it.