The author, most recently, of the essay collection “Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises” keeps an eye on the “daily eruptions of the internet”: “Like a lot of us, I’m hypervigilant about the crazy stuff going on.”

What books are on your nightstand?

There’s quite a pillar at this point, including Adrienne Rich’s “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence” and Adrienne Maree Brown’s “Emergent Strategy,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s “How We Get Free,” Erika L. Sánchez’s “Lessons on Expulsion,” Philip Levine’s “One for the Rose,” Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery’s “Joyful Militancy.” Alexander Chee’s “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel” is probably the most recently published thing in the stack, and it’s wonderful.

What’s the last great book you read?

It’s a tossup between Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier” and Roxane Gay’s “Hunger.” Though I should say that I’m often not a reader of books from one end to the other but a rover, as a result of more than half a lifetime of doing research in books, where you’re there not just for the pleasure (though there is often considerable pleasure) but to find out some particular thing. Also I get interrupted a lot, and misplace books in this house of books, and so one way or another I’m usually reading about a dozen books at a time.

What’s your go-to classic? And your favorite book no one else has heard of?

More than any other book, Jorge Luis Borges’s “Labyrinths,” which I discovered when I was 15, showed me what was possible in short prose nonfiction. Subcomandante Marcos’s writings in conjunction with the 1994 Zapatista revolution showed me how lyrical and literary political writing could be, so the anthologies of his manifestoes and essays are up there in my pantheon, along with Rilke’s “Duino Elegies,” which I go back to again and again with a sense that they’re both unfathomable and inexhaustible.