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Norman Lock: I read now, have always read since knowing that what I wished to do was write, works in opposition; that is, books or stories whose styles, structures, purposes are contrary, are themselves irreconcilable. I would recommend such a course of reading to anyone who wishes to write. It little matters what is read, so long as it is followed by a contrasting work. With contrast comes tension. With tension, the necessary perturbation and anxiety, which seeks always to discharge its tension and thus create anew. Tension in the mind of the writer disturbs stasis, must inevitably produce a movement toward novelty or, say, originality. In writing, synthesis is the machine, as in every other productive enterprise. Thesis succeeded by its opposite, antithesis, in order to effect synthesis, the transformation of that which is known into that which was not previously suspected in or of oneself.
 For me, the opposing forces were -- and may still be -- Hemingway's In Our Time, for the clarity of the sentences and the seeming depthless surface (through which one learns to look and see what symbols are in hiding there); then Eliot's The Waste Land, that astonishing and great poem, to witness transubstantiating imagery, the juxtaposition of fragments in a compositional mode diametrically opposed to Hemingway's, or, for that matter, William Carlos Williams's -- his work will do to oppose Eliot's. Or, say, read, as I read, In Our Time first and then Donald Barthelme's Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts to see what can be accomplished entirely on the surface, with words and words alone. Or instead of the Barthelme, read Stein's Tender Buttons or the portraits or, better yet, read Kafka's Metamorphosis where narrative is clearly elaborated, characters worked up with economy but O, the poetry and mystery that Kafka, a master of us all, effects! But regardless of author, let one develop his own voice through the systematic reading of opposites.
Ken Sparling: Go into the local library, close your eyes and wander around until you bump into a book shelf. Keeping your eyes closed, pull a book off the shelf. Take it to the circulation desk, say hi nicely to the person working at the library. Present your library card and check out the book you found. Take the book home and read it. All of it. Force yourself to read the whole thing, even if you hate it. You'll find out something. Maybe something you weren't expecting. Hopefully something you weren't expecting. What you'll learn from this little exercise is, not how to write better, but how to live better. The next time you write, maybe you'll close your eyes and wander around the aisles of your imagination
in a way that invites adventure, the way your little trip to the library did.
Greg Mulcahy: James Joyce's Ulysses: It's the book that showed me a book could do anything.
Brian Evenson: If I had to chose one book, it would be Kafka's collected stories, because, as Nathalie Sarraute suggests in The Age of Suspicion it is with Kafka that we see a decided break with the literature of the past and the inauguration of the literary age I believe we are still a part of. I would even argue that everything going on in literature today was prefigured in Kafka, from the use of fake forms to the short-short as a viable narrative and everything in between. If I had to choose one story to encourage younger practitioners to study, it would be "A Country Doctor," which is one of the strangest and most beautiful stories ever written (in the original or in the right translation) with its multiplicitous and maddened doubling and its at once vivid and cursory creation of an imaginary world. None of the other writers I love so much -- Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Jose Saramago, Leonardo Sciascia, Friederich Durrenmatt, etc. -- would have been possible without Kafka.
Andrew Day: An aspiring novelist, someone who wants to write something at once entertaining and complex, should read Nabokov's Pale Fire. I'd tell an aspiring short story writer to read either a Borges collection
or a Chekhov collection. If I had to pick one short story to recommend, I'd
go with Borges's "El Sur."
Michael Neff: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: great hook, voice, major complication, rising action, realism, great character sketches, theme.
Aaron Belz: The one book I would advise students of poetry to read and study is Kenneth Koch's Making Your Own Days. It helps writers become effective readers of both the form and spirit of poetry through several chapters of discussion of what poetry is, how it works, and why it's important to the development of culture, and it includes a short anthology of poems ranging from ancient to postmodern. Koch doesn't mind seeming traditional at times--or at least he shows the relevance of traditional poetics to today's poet--but he also embraces the quirkiness of his own age. It is a very plainspoken and enjoyable volume.
Neal Durando: Those books that are with me now have undergone quite a lot of movement. If there is one book -- let's call it Renner's book -- which I would press upon someone insistent upon following an inadvisable path ghosting mine, surely it resides among the dozen or so volumes I have with me now.
For it must have held up physically, unlike my adored Tortora & Anagnostakos Principles of Anatomy, which my sister carelessly destroyed in one semester flat -- how I loved the Tortora & Anagnostakos as a book: in fact, I originally set out to become a doctor so much did I love the clarity of its setting and photography.
Whatever book Renner is after, it must not have been sold off over any of the moves I've endured. The only books I slightly regret (or remember) in this regard was a set of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that I long ago boosted from Random House.
Nor may it reside in the obscure warehouse where the bulk of my library rests, somewhere in Ohio. It has been three years since I interred my papers in this disliked corner of an unhappy country. Among those volumes is the Sierra Club's guide to land navigation, which I think of from time to time. It's wonderfully substantial and explains the workings of a compass such that the knowledge will never leave you.
Renner's book must be among the few volumes I brought with me to France four years ago. Many usual suspects here: The Odyssey of Homer, The Histories of Herodotus, Dante's The Divine Comedy, Sarmiento's
visionary Facundo, Beckett's trilogy, Cortázar's Cuentos Completos, Borges's Ficciones. At the airport in Texas, my mother gave me a copy Neruda's Odas Elementales. At the airport in London, I bought a
copy of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. Also in my bags was my prized galley copy of Jack Gilbert's The Great Fires and John Rybicki's Traveling at High Speeds, both of which I have reread hundreds of times.
Perhaps Renner's book is one which I've bought since then, but I must admit my reading has tapered off considerably. I was pleased to rediscover the care with which The Great Gatsby was written while teaching it to high school students. I swiped a copy of Trotsky's autobiography from the same school, so much did I admire its clarity. So, is it Time Regained, the final volume of Proust's mammoth work? Or Julien Gracq's elegant La Forme d'une ville? Jean Rouald's Les Champs d'honneur and Nicholson Baker's A Box of Matches deserve high mention as well.
I'm lucky to have all of the above. But one must still make do. Whichever book you happen to have on hand is the vital one, as it must bear the weight of all your attention, indeed of all your life. The languages are strong enough to bear all your life. Try them. Then accept this essential error: anything
can contain everything.
Simon DeDeo: R.W. Franklin's new edition of the poems of Emily Dickinson. From her letters alone you can learn almost as much about the cross of
compassion and language as from any of the more 'usual' suspects for deep study:
Pound, say, or Joyce.
I have been reading a biography of Dickinson, where I'm told that Dickinson's first recorded words were 'the fire,' to a thunderstorm she was caught in while being carried from Amherst to Monson by her aunt.
A lot of poets can be adaquately encountered by the peaks of their
output: I've never found it necessary to go much beyond Prufrock and Waste Land, for example. But it is troubling to me -- and I think a reason
why she does not receive as much attention as does, e.g., Whitman -- that Dickinson is known mostly by a few of her highlights.
The true strangeness of Dickinson, the real nuclear reactor of Amherst, smouldering, cannot emerge without giving her the power to create her own background. More than most, Dickinson floats free of 'great works' poetic context (neglecting a penchant for her family's edition of Shakespeare); she must be allowed to create her own, from her own words.
The rewards of studying Dickinson, as I see them, are an induction into a completely new syntax and grammar, far more radical than the modernist, a condition approaching the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E artists in its blocking of received form, an authenticity of voice that brings us to a dark core of humanity where we face ourselves, estranged, wonderfully new. I could not imagine a model more likely to lead a new writer on to great, truly original work.
"To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life." Dickinson's
life was a form of great resistance, performed rather than recorded, and as
such is a model of writerly courage.
Deron Bauman: James Joyce: Instead of picking one book, I would suggest a writer. And if you study Joyce, if one studies Joyce, one finds the stages possible for the writer of fiction. The stages he went through, the books that are their byproducts, reflect the range a writer may explore, from the real to the sublime, from the concrete to the abstract, from the distinct to the multitudinous. But more importantly, I would say, attenuate yourself to craft, make it ambitious, this pursuit, make it fundamental.
Blood Meridian: A patient analysis will provide the student with many lessons: It is the last of McCarthy's literary books. It contains within it exquisite examples of his strengths and weaknesses. It provides a concrete instance of how to judge where a book starts and stops, beyond the intentions of the author. It is written with power and grace. And overstatement and melodrama. It shows clearly and precisely how to do everything right and shows the seeds and shortcomings that will prove his undoing. It is tragically great and quite simply tragic; for all that McCarthy is, and all that McCarthy became, is contained in the
book.
Guy Davenport: The book that has had the most recent impact on me is Guy Davenport's Da Vinci's Bicycle. In it I see the fruition of the possible after
Joyce's annihilation. Davenport is what grows back if a writer is paying attention. I believe Diane Williams and Jane Unrue to be examples of this as well.
Michael Estabrook: I would advise pure poetry lovers (not necessarily poetry writers) to read and study and bask in Dante's Divine Comedy; it has everything and gets deeper and more beautiful with each reading.
However, as a practitioner (which directly answers your question) of poetry and particularly of American English poetry, then there is only one real answer to the question -- Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is the one book
from which a poet can learn the most about our craft.
Whispers of heavenly death murmur'd I hear,
Labial gossip of night, sibilant chorals,
Footsteps gently ascending, mystical breezes wafted soft and low,
Ripples of unseen rivers, tides of a current flowing, forever flowing,
(Or is it the plashing of tears? the measureless waters of human tears?)
Philip Quinn: I'm tempted to resort to Northrop Frye's idea that it all starts with The Bible but already I hear the objections so why not The Koran or The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Instead, I turn to a simple sentence I found in Leonard Cohen's novel Beautiful Losers:
O Reader, do you know that a man is writing this?
When I came across this, I was in the midst of completing an undergrad degree in English Literature. The dead or the soon-to-be-dead produced literature, and it consisted of an evolutionary series of movements, the Romantics marching behind Augustan poets such as Alexander Pope.
Cohen put me back into my skin that even Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Blake belched, suffered headaches and worried about paying the rent. Paradoxically, I found in his book first published in 1966, a summation to date of the territory the novel and even poetry had already travelled.
Beautiful Losers using modern juxtaposition and a kind of surrealism
strangely enough had a lyricism that was as beautiful as anything the Romantics ever produced, but also had reference to comics, the movies, and like W.S. Burroughs and even James Joyce, a healthy disregard for traditional narrative, the 'he said, she said' kind of exposition that still very much dominates the literary mainstream.
For a few years, Beautiful Losers was The Book but of course, we all move on, don't we?
In a way, it was my start, and now every story or piece of fiction that I write feels like I'm at the end of literature, or at least my contribution to it.
Hugh Steinberg: I'd say the collected works of William Shakespeare, with Pound's Cantos in second place.
That said, I must say that I profoundly disagree with the idea behind the question. No one should ever read/study just one book. The joy and pleasure of reading is in multiplicity, of exploring the sheer fecundity of written language, from cereal boxes to Chaucer. That especially holds true for those who wish to write: writers have to read, and read widely, voraciously, or else their writing becomes stunted and their behavior more than a little narcissistic.
Brian Beatty: What one book would I advise young poets to study if all other poetry collections were lost down a deep well like so many clumsy toddlers? The
Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.
This puffy white guy's poems have aged remarkably well since he wrote them. And the unique challenges they pose, to readers and writers alike, are as relevant now as they were then.
More than just astonishing words, Stevens wrote poems of astonishing ideas. He understood better than most of his modernist peers that poetry could be about a certain something and be about the language, too. These priorities were never mutually exclusive in his mind. Nor in his poems.
His birds and flowers and exotic geographies are more interesting -- and intellectually dangerous -- than other poets' birds and flowers and exotic geographies. In other words, his things are not always what they seem.
That's an insurance executive for you.
Stevens is famous, if at all, for his poem about pottery south of Kentucky. But young poets should memorize "A Rabbit As King Of The Ghosts" or maybe "Saint John And The Back-Ache," two difficult, flawed pieces far better than anything mere mortals of today should even dare to write.
His rhyming poems are not cute. His long poems are not boring. His poem titles call out hipster irony, easy surrealism and theoretical wordplay. His Pulitzer Prize-winning oeuvre is crammed with works ideally suited to a lifetime of reading. Then rereading. Then rereading again.
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