Literature

‘Prayer’ (1985) by Galway Kinnell

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

“I typically say Kinnell’s words at the start of my day, as I’m pedaling a traffic-laden path to my office,” says Major Jackson, 57, the author of six books of poetry, including “Razzle Dazzle” (2023). “The poem encourages a calm acceptance of the day’s events but also wants us to embrace the misapprehension and oblivion of life, to avoid probing too deeply for answers to inscrutable questions. I admire what Kinnell does with only 14 words; the repetition of ‘what,’ ‘that’ and ‘is’ would seem to limit the poem’s sentiment but, paradoxically, the poem opens widely to contain all manner of human experience. The three ‘is’es in the middle line give it a symmetry that makes its message feel part of a natural order, and even more convincing. Thanks to the skillful punctuation, pauses and staccato rhythm, a tonal quality of interior reflection emerges. Much like a haiku, it continues after its last words, lingering like the last note played on a piano that slowly fades.”

“Just as I was entering young adulthood, probably slow to claim romantic feelings, a girlfriend copied out a poem by Pablo Neruda and slipped it into an envelope with red lipstick kisses all over it. In turn, I recited this poem. It took me the remainder of that winter to memorize its lines,” says Jackson. “The poem captures the pitch of longing that defines love at its most intense. The speaker in Shakespeare’s most famous sonnet believes the poem creates the beloved, ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.’ (Sonnet 18). In Rilke’s expressive declarations of yearning, the beloved remains elusive. Wherever the speaker looks or travels, she marks his world by her absence. I find this deeply moving.”

“Clifton faced many obstacles, including cancer, a kidney transplant and the loss of her husband and two of her children. Through it all, she crafted a long career as a pre-eminent American poet,” says Jackson. “Her poem ‘won’t you celebrate with me’ is a war cry, an invitation to share in her victories against life’s persistent challenges. The poem is meaningful to all who have had to stare down death in a hospital or had to bereave the passing of close relations. But, even for those who have yet to mourn life’s vicissitudes, the poem is instructive in cultivating resilience and a persevering attitude. I keep coming back to the image of the speaker’s hands and the spirit of steadying oneself in the face of unspeakable storms. She asks in a perfectly attuned gorgeously metrical line, ‘what did i see to be except myself?’”

‘Sonnet 94’ (1609) by William Shakespeare

They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmovèd, cold, and to temptation slow,
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die;
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity.
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

“It’s one of the moments of Western consciousness,” says Frederick Seidel, 90, the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, including “So What” (2024). “Shakespeare knows and says what he knows.”

“It trombones magnificent, unbearable sorrow,” says Seidel.

“It’s smartass and bitter and bright,” says Seidel.

These interviews have been edited and condensed.

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Literature

FRANCE

According to the writer Leïla Slimani, 44, the author of ‘The Country of Others’ (2020).

Classic

‘Essais de Montaigne’ (‘Essays of Montaigne,’ 1580)

“France is a country of nuance with a love of conversation and freedom and an aversion to fanaticism. It’s also a country built on reflexive subjectivity. Montaigne reveals all that, writing, ‘I am myself the matter of my book.’”

Contemporary

‘La Carte et le Territoire’ (‘The Map and the Territory,’ 2010) by Michel Houellebecq

“Houellebecq describes France as a museum, where landscape turns into décor and where rural areas are emptying out. He shows the gap between the Parisian elite and the rest of the population, which he paints as aging and disoriented by modernity. It’s a melancholic and yet ironic novel about a disenchanted nation.”

JAPAN

According to the writer Yoko Ogawa, 64, the author of ‘The Memory Police’ (1994).

Classic

‘Man’yoshu’ (late eighth century)

“‘Man’yoshu,’ the oldest extant collection of Japanese poetry, reflects a diversity of voices — from emperors to commoners. They bow their heads to the majesty of nature, weep at the loss of loved ones and find pathos in death. The pages pulse with the vitality of successive generations.”

Contemporary

‘Tenohira no Shosetsu’ (‘Palm-of-the-Hand Stories,’ 1923-72) by Yasunari Kawabata

“The essence of Japanese literature might lie in brevity: waka [a classical 31-syllable poetry form], haiku and short stories. There’s a tradition of cherishing words that seem to well up from the depths of the heart, imbued with warmth. Kawabata, too, exudes more charm in his short stories — especially these very short ‘palm-of-the-hand’ stories — than in his full-length novels. Good and evil, beauty and ugliness, love and hate — everything is contained in these modest worlds.”

INDIA

According to Aatish Taseer, 45, a T contributing writer and the author of ‘Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands’ (2009).

Classic

‘The Kumarasambhava’ (‘The Birth of Kumara,’ circa fifth century) by Kalidasa

“This is an epic poem by the greatest of the classical Sanskrit poets and dramatists. The gods are in a pickle. They’re being tormented by a monster, but Shiva, their natural protector, is deep in meditation and cannot be disturbed. Kama, the god of love, armed with his flower bow, is sent down from the heavens to waken Shiva. Never a wise idea! The great god, in his fury, opens his third eye and incinerates Kama. But then, paradoxically, the death of the god of love engenders one of the greatest love stories ever told. In the final canto, Shiva and his wife, the goddess Parvati, have the most electrifying sex for days on end — and, 15 centuries on, in our now censorious time, it still leaves one agog at the sensual wonder that was India.”

Contemporary

‘The Complex’ (2026) by Karan Mahajan

“This state-of-the-nation novel, which was published just last month, captures the squalor and malice of Indian family life. Delhi is both my and Mahajan’s hometown and, in this sprawling homage to India’s capital, we see it on the eve of the economic liberalization of the 1990s, as the old socialist city gives way to a megalopolis of ambition, greed and political cynicism.”

THE UNITED KINGDOM

According to the writer Tessa Hadley, 70, the author of ‘The London Train’ (2011).

Classic

‘Jane Eyre’ (1847) by Charlotte Brontë

“Written almost 200 years ago, it remains an insight into our collective soul — or at least its female part. Somewhere at the heart of us there’s a small girl in a wintry room, curled up in the window seat with a book, watching the lashing rain on the window glass: ‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. …’ Jane’s solemnity, her outraged sense of justice, her trials to come, the wild weather outside, her longing for something better, for love in her future: All this speaks, perhaps problematically, to something buried in the foundations of our idea of ourselves.”

Contemporary

‘All That Man Is’ (2016) by David Szalay

“Though he isn’t quite completely British (he’s part Canadian, part Hungarian), Szalay is brilliant at catching certain aspects of British men — aspects that haven’t been written about for a while, now updated for a new era. Funny, exquisitely observed and terrifying, this novel reminds us, too, how absolutely our fate and our identity as a nation belong with the rest of Europe.”

BRAZIL

According to the writer and critic Noemi Jaffe, 64, the author of ‘What Are the Blind Men Dreaming?’ (2016).

Classic

‘Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas’ (‘The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas,’ 1881) by Machado de Assis

“Not only is it experimental in style — very short chapters mixed with long ones; different points of view; narrated by a corpse; metalinguistic — but it also introduces an extremely ironic view of the rising bourgeoisie in Rio de Janeiro at the time, revealing the hypocrisy of slave owners, the falsehood of love affairs and the only true reason for all social relationships: convenience and personal interest. After almost 150 years, it’s still modern, both formally and, unfortunately, also in content.”

Contemporary

‘Onde Pastam os Minotauros’ (‘Where Minotaurs Graze,’ 2023) by Joca Reiners Terron

“The two main characters — Cão and Crente — along with some of their colleagues, plan to escape and set fire to the slaughterhouse where they work under exploitative conditions. The men develop sympathy for the animals they kill, and one of them becomes a sort of philosopher, revealing the sheer nonsense of existence and the injustices of society in the deepest parts of Brazil.”

These interviews have been edited and condensed.

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Literature

The Myth of Meeting Oneself

“This is evident in Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ (circa 30-19 B.C.) when Aeneas witnesses his own heroic actions depicted in murals of the Trojan War in Juno’s temple, and again in Miguel de Cervantes’s ‘Don Quixote’ (1605-15) when Quixote enters a printer’s shop and finds a book that has been published with fake details about his quest even as he’s living it,” says Ben Okri, 67, the author of “The Famished Road” (1991) and “Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted” (2025). “In both stories, individuals throw themselves into the world and think they encounter objects, personae, obstacles and antagonists, but what they actually encounter is themselves. In our time, where our actions meet us in the echo chamber of social media, the process is magnified and swifter. Now a deed doesn’t even have to take place for it to enter the realm of reality.”

The Myth of Utopia

“I’ve always had trouble with the idea of utopia, feeling it derives its energy more from what it wishes to dismantle than what it wishes to enact,” says the T writer at large Aatish Taseer, 45, the author of “Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands” (2009). “Ram Rajya, or the mythical rule of the hero Ram in the Hindu epic ‘Ramayana’ (seventh century B.C.-third century A.D.), like all visions of perfection, contains a built-in violence.”

The Myth of Invisibility

“Invisibility bears power and powerlessness at the same time,” says Okri. “In ancient cultures, it was a gift of the gods. Jesus, for example, walks unrecognized among his disciples, and in Greek myths, Scandinavian legends and ancient African tales, heroes are gifted invisibility in the form of cloaks, sandals or spells. Modern works like the two ‘Invisible Man’ novels, by H.G. Wells (1897) and Ralph Ellison (1952), and the ‘Harry Potter’ novels (1997-2007) by J.K. Rowling reach back to those ideas. But today, people talk about visibility as the highest form of social agency, while invisibility can render a whole class, race, caste or gender unseen.”

The Myth of Steadiness vs. Speed

“‘The Tortoise and the Hare,’ one of Aesop’s fables (sixth century B.C.), doesn’t necessarily strike a younger person as promising — possibly it has a whiff of morality in it,” says Yiyun Li, 53, the author of “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” (2005) and “Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life” (2017). “But the longer I live and work, the more I understand that it’s the tortoiseness in a person that carries one along, not the swiftness of the mind and body of the hare.”

The Myth of Magic

“Ancient magical tales like Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ (late eighth to early seventh century B.C.) were allegories of transformation, of secret teachings,” says Okri, “whereas modern forms of magic are narrative devices and tropes of storytelling that continue the child’s wonder of life. I think of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ (1925), Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ (1967) and, again, the ‘Harry Potter’ books. The intuition of magic persists even in these atheistic and science-infested times, where nothing is to be believed if it can’t be subjected to analysis. This is perhaps because the ultimate magic confronts us every day in the mystery of consciousness. That we can see anything is magical; that we experience love is magical; and perhaps the most magical thing of all is the imagination’s unending power to alter the contents and coordinates of reality. It hides tenaciously in the act of reading, which is the most generative act of magic.”

The Myth of the Immortal Soul

“ ‘The soul is birthless and eternal, imperishable and timeless and is not destroyed when the body is destroyed,’ says Krishna in the ‘Bhagavad Gita’ (second century-first century B.C.). This belief in the immortality of the soul — what used to be called Pythagoreanism in ancient Greece — is still the most pervasive myth in India,” says Taseer, “and has more influence over behavior and how one lives one’s life than any other.”

These interviews have been edited and condensed.

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