Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?

Questions like this make me uneasy for two fundamental reasons. Firstly, in anything other than a stark and unqualified list that unreels to the end of our allotted space here, there are going to be serious, gaping omissions that will cause me to wake at 3 in the morning and groan in useless torment at my own inadequacy as both a friend and reader. Secondly, I tend to exist at a remote and quarantined distance from most of the world’s news and information media. Given what a spectacular year this is turning out to be for bad news on both sides of the Atlantic, there remains a lingering anxiety about whether all of one’s nominees will still be extant come the (so to speak) deadline. With that said, there follows a painfully incomplete list of names that happen to be passing through my mind right at this specific moment: Pynchon; Coover; Neal Stephenson; Junot Díaz; Joe Hill; William Gibson; Bruce Sterling; Samuel R. Delany; Iain Sinclair; Brian Catling; Michael Moorcock (his currently underway “Whispering Swarm” trilogy is astonishing); Eimear McBride; the remarkable Steve Aylett for everything, and in particular for his indispensable and quietly radioactive “Heart of the Original”; Laura Hird; Geoff Ryman; M. John Harrison; screenwriter Amy Jump. . . . Look, I can either go on forever or I can’t go on. I’m already mortified by the pathetic lack of women writers represented and find myself starting to come up with wretched excuses and squirming evasions. Best we end this here.

What genres do you prefer? And which do you avoid?

To be honest, having worked in genre for so long, I’m happiest when I’m outside it altogether, or perhaps more accurately, when I can conjure multiple genres all at once, in accordance with my theory (now available, I believe, as a greeting card and fridge magnet) that human life as we experience it is a simultaneous multiplicity of genres. I put it much more elegantly on the magnet. With that said, of course, there are considerable pleasures to be found in genre, foremost among which is that of either violating or transcending it, assuming there’s a difference, and using it to talk about something else entirely. Some subversions, paradoxically, can even seem to reinvigorate the stale conventions that they’d set out to subvert or satirize. All genres, given enough ingenuity, can be adapted to this strategy, and the sole genre or subgenre that I personally am pathologically averse to would be that pertaining to the superhero, but apparently that’s just me.

What books did you read while working on your new novel?

Bearing in mind that it’s been almost a decade since I commenced work on “Jerusalem,” I’d have to say that I read very little fiction while I was writing it. I think I read Mike Moorcock’s “The Vengeance of Rome” quite early in the process and also read the first volume of Brian Catling’s monumental “Vorrh” trilogy, and it was around then that I decided that it would probably be best not to read any more massive and beautifully written works of fiction until I’d finished the one that I was personally engaged in. I suppose I didn’t want to subject myself to the pointless torment of “maybe I should have written it more like this,” and as a result for the past few years I’ve been largely engaged with nonfiction. This has consisted of a lot of work by the prolific Iain Sinclair, including his superb “Ghost Milk,” “American Smoke,” “Black Apples of Gower” and a half a dozen others. Then there was “The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds,” by the immaculate John Higgs, along with the same author’s revelatory history of the 20th century, “Stranger Than We Can Imagine.” I also read a whole stack of books by Slavoj Zizek, like “The Year of Dreaming Dangerously” and “Living in the End Times,” but the bulk of my reading over the last several years has been research. Very little of this has been pertinent to “Jerusalem” (most of the research for which was concluded before I commenced the book itself) but has instead been focused on my current comic-book series Providence, which is a serious fictional engagement with the works of H. P. Lovecraft. As a result I have roughly half a bookcaseful of contemporary H. P. Lovecraft criticism and biography, much of it by the inspiring S. T. Joshi, along with numerous invaluable works on some of the more obscure corners of early-20th-century America, like the Boston police strike riots of 1919, or gay culture in New York prior to 1920. One interesting insight that I gleaned from working on both books at roughly the same time was that a lot of post-World War I American history was predicated upon the Russian Revolution having occurred in 1917 — the original Red Scare was 1919 — while the dismantling of the Boroughs, the working-class area that Jerusalem revolves around, was commenced in 1918 and was presumably precipitated by the exact same thing. A sufficiently heterogeneous reading list can sometimes yield vital and unexpected connections (but it will always devour your precious time).