Cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum is the author of Humiliation (Picador, August 2, 2011) and 12 other books of poetry, fiction and criticism.
On your nightstand now:
Lewis Hyde's The Gift; Dodie Bellamy's The Buddhist; Adrienne Rich's Tonight No Poetry Will Serve; Alan Gilbert's Late in the Antenna Fields; Hervé Guibert's Mon valet et moi; Bruce Boone's My Walk with Bob.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.
Your top five authors:
Frank O'Hara, Marcel Proust, Roland Barthes, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein.
Writers who are your role models (or your "ego ideals"):
Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Bowles, Jean Rhys, Susan Sontag, John Ashbery, Thomas Bernhard.
Book you've faked reading:
The King James Bible.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. Writers and artists who live under the threatening sway of perfectionism need to pay attention to Pessoa's message: failure, too, has its own music.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Amanda Filipacchi's Nude Men. On its cover: a photo of green jello in a glass goblet.
Book that changed your life:
Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, Studies on Hysteria. I felt galvanized by the case history of Anna O., the charismatic and aphasic hysteric who invented the "talking cure."
Favorite line from a book:
From Elizabeth Bishop's "The Bight" in her Complete Poems: "All the untidy activity continues,/ awful but cheerful." Never have the ordinary words "awful" and "cheerful" received finer treatment.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Francis Ponge's Soap. This fragrant (and fragmented) prose poem is a foaming, crazy dossier of attempts to put soap's bubbly properties into words. When I first read it, I badly needed to hear its message: "these compositions in the fugue form which you readily admit in music, which you admit and enjoy--why should they, in literature, be forbidden?" Permit your wildest impulses. Never censor.