The book I am currently reading

I’m always reading too many books at once, but most notably: The Idiot by Elif Batuman, and I’ve just finished Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin. Both are so strange and beautiful.

The books that changed my life

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector, The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, The Bell Jar by Silvia Plath, The Round House by Louise Erdrich, The Blue Octavo Notebooks by Franz Kafka, and more recently-ish Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong, Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar, Heavy by Kiese Laymon, and Mouthful of Birds by Schweblin – in no particular order.

The book I couldn’t finish

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, though I plan to finish it one day, the Edith Grossman translation.

The book that influenced me

See above. The books that changed my life changed me as a writer, and the reason they were so important to me was because of how they influenced the way I think about writing and what it can and maybe should be doing.

I'm ashamed not to have read Conrad's Heart of Darkness

The book that is most overrated

On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Maybe it made more sense for a different generation but I didn’t find anything impressive about the writing or the story itself.

The last book that made me cry

Mouthful of Birds.

The book I wish I’d written

One of the books I’m working on now, by which I mean I hope I write it, by which I mean am actually able to finish it.

The book I’m ashamed not to have read

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Literary critic John Leonard said this: “Why don’t the white guys look for the heart of darkness in their own bathrooms?”

My earliest reading memory

Loving The Monster at the End of This Book, about Grover the monster from Sesame Street, because of the humour and how it directly addressed the reader in such a surprising way. I don’t have many early memorable reading experiences, as I didn’t really start reading for the love of it until my early 20s. The first novel that made me want to write a novel and that I’ve since read several more times is A Confederacy of Dunces.

The book I give

The Hour of the Star. It’s short and powerful, and I think everyone should read it and really all of Lispector’s writing.

• There There by Tommy Orange is published in paperback by Vintage.