The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton (Mariner, $18). Sexton was the first poet I discovered on my own. I was 18 years old, and had recently made the decision to become a writer. I took Anne home and fell so hard and fast, line after line, stanza after stanza. Years after her suicide, I can hear her writing about herself, but also directly to that budding writer in me: “A woman like that is not a woman, quite. / I have been her kind.”
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (Broadway, $15). I love the way this one insists that it’s both true and it’s fiction—memory and fact colliding in the crash that is war, men at their worst and sometimes at their best and most noble, and in O’Brien’s hands, always, astonishingly human.
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Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver (Vintage, $15). I’m not the first one to call Carver a master and to admit being floored by every word. When I discovered his work, it confirmed what I’d been thinking for years: Stories and the examination of other lives and one’s own might just make for a meaningful life, that reading and writing are interconnected—the love of one being what propels the urge, fire, and excitement for the other.
The Complete Stories
Maps to Anywhere
We Need to Talk About Kevin
The Bad Seed
The Fifth Child