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My liking for Scandinavian crime fiction led me into exploring literary writers from the same countries.

I always gravitate towards anything from Ireland. With Irish lit, I love the use of language, but also in many instances, the Irish writers are writing about people and circumstances that I can relate to.

I primarily read fiction, and I read a good many wonderful books while writing 'The Visibles.'

I fell in love with words in all languages, and I read everything I could find, particularly myths and legends and histories and archeology and any novels.

I don't divide my reading into demographic categories, any more than I'd divide my friends into groups along ethnic or sexual lines. The thing I look for most is a sense of literary rawness - bareback fiction, if you will.

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

My mother was a reader; my father was a reader. Not anything particularly sophisticated. My mother read fat historical or romantic novels; my father liked to read Westerns, Zane Grey, that kind of stuff. Whatever they brought in, I read.

I'm a fan of books that are almost languorous in their storytelling. That is a little bit lost sometimes in the modern media that we have.

I love contemporary North American fiction and short fiction. My favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen, and my favorite writers of short fiction are George Saunders and Alice Munro.