What books are on your night stand?

I’ll only include the ones I’m actively reading, or else this list will get rowdy: a collection of Russian fairy tales illustrated by Ivan Bilibin and curated by Gillian Avery; “Primeval and Other Times,” by Olga Tokarczuk; “The Alignment Problem,” by Brian Christian; “Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art,” by Susan L. Aberth; “Biography of X,” by Catherine Lacey; “Strangers to Ourselves,” by Rachel Aviv; “Hurricane Season,” by Fernanda Melchor; “The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem”; and “Poverty, by America,” by Matthew Desmond.

What’s the last great book you read?

I am most often moved by poetry, so I’ll name some collections I’ve adored in recent memory. “A Sand Book,” by Ariana Reines; “Phantompains,” by Therese Estacion; “Good Boys,” by Megan Fernandes; Knopf’s “Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara,” edited by Mark Ford; and a manuscript by my brilliant friend Laura Cresté, the working title of which is “Gentle or Not.” She’s currently revising it and preparing for submission. It’s a gift to the world.

What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?

I don’t have a great sense of what is heard or unheard of; I’ve been known to earnestly text friends things like: Have you heard of this underground filmmaker named Michael Moore? How about this 1967 album by Leonard Cohen?? I couldn’t remember who Bill Murray was the other day. At the same time, I often mistakenly assume that contemporary poets are household names. I’m out of the loop. But one writer I would love to see endlessly celebrated in America is Yuri Herrera. His novellas are sublime.

Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?

An incomplete list: Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, Maggie Nelson, Yuri Herrera, Zadie Smith, Diane Williams, Valeria Luiselli, Olga Tokarczuk, Rachel Kushner, Elena Ferrante, Ben Lerner, Carmen Maria Machado, Joy Williams, Hanif Abdurraqib, Nuar Alsadir, Robin Coste Lewis, Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Sharon Olds, Morgan Parker, Tommy Pico, Terrance Hayes, Ada Limón, Tracy K. Smith, Annie Baker, Amy Herzog, Paula Vogel, Svetlana Alexievich, Rachel Aviv, Ed Yong, Matthew Desmond, Alexandra Kleeman, Susan Choi, Chris Ware, Tommy Orange, Javier Zamora, Jenny Offill, Annie Ernaux, Anne Enright, Lydia Davis, Raven Leilani, Mark Z. Danielewski, Jennifer Egan, George Saunders. I can’t believe I get to share a time period with all of these people.

What’s the last book you read that made you cry?

“Calling a Wolf a Wolf,” by Kaveh Akbar, specifically the penultimate poem: “I Won’t Lie This Plague of Gratitude.” Akbar alchemizes pain into beauty line after line, but it was an unexpected evocation of hope that made me cry. In this poem, the speaker is thunderstruck by a newfound “plague of gratitude.” The speaker says: “Not long ago I was hard to even/hug ... I had to learn to love people one at a time/singing hey diddle diddle will you suffer me/a little ... now I am cheery/and Germanic like a drawer full/of strudel.” Akbar’s describing a small psychological sanctuary — a relief, permanent or fleeting, from everything that has haunted the speaker until now. The poem plunged me into that first miraculous flash of hope you enjoy after a long storm of bad brain chemistry. The moment you remember that it can be enjoyable to simply exist.

The last book that made you furious?

So many come to mind. I guess I’m often furious? I’m currently reading three impeccably researched works of nonfiction that are informing previously amorphous concerns. “Poverty, by America,” by Matthew Desmond, investigates structurally engineered poverty. One of the many memorable facts that this book delineates is that America spends over twice as much on tax benefits for the upper class as it does on national defense. “Empire of Pain,” by Patrick Radden Keefe, makes me enraged about the Sackler family, of course, but more generally about how vulnerable American health care and pharmaceutical systems are to bad actors — worse, poorly regulated capitalism incentivizes bad actors to do harm. “The Alignment Problem,” by Brian Christian, makes me furious about the myopic tech boys currently pursuing immortality and godlike dominance by attempting to summon the existential threat of artificial general intelligence into the world. They are facilitated by an absence of legal restrictions and the primeval excuse that if We don’t do it first, They will.

What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

My family is always shocked by how many books on neuroscience and quantum physics I’ve amassed. They like to remind me that I am bad at science. Probably most surprising is that I’m still under the delusion that I will someday read all 1,500 pages of “The Matter With Things,” by Iain McGilchrist — a blend of neuroscience, metaphysics and epistemology about the hemispheres of the brain and the nature of consciousness. I think you start levitating as soon as you finish it.

What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?

When I graduated college, my good friend Alex gave me a beautiful, professionally bound copy of the novella I wrote for my thesis. He even got a mutual friend to blurb it. The novella itself is a catastrophe — a cluttered story about four characters from different centuries saddled with shared omniscient narration who meet in a Purgatory that resembles postindustrial Indiana. Eventually, it collapses into metafictional chaos. Flawed as the project is, I had transferred my 21-year-old spirit into its pages, and Alex knew that if I could hold a leatherbound copy of this effort in my hands, if I could see my name engraved in gold on the spine, some psychological chasm between the life I had and the life I wanted would begin to close. For years, as I submitted my fiction and accumulated rejections, losing faith that I would ever publish, I would catch a glimpse of this book on my shelf, and its presence would nourish me. It remains one of the most cherished gifts I’ve ever received.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

Dante Alighieri, Hildegard von Bingen and Anne Carson. I’d rather watch them dine together than participate; I’d have a panic attack if I had to moderate that conversation or cook them food. But I have a feeling that it would be a very quiet dinner, even if they all spoke the same language. I can see them elegantly slicing asparagus on their plates, abstemious drinkers submerged in the deep ends of their turbulent intellects. But then each of them would write a masterpiece about it.

What do you plan to read next?

“The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington.” Like so many women of the Surrealist movement, Carrington never received the global recognition that her male counterparts (like her ex, Max Ernst) did, even though she was brilliant. Less in thrall to Freud but equally interested in the subconscious. She’s not trying to compete with Dalí, and for most of her life she was ignored enough by the market to ignore the market in turn. She’s folkloric and supernatural and free. I was studying a book of her paintings recently, enchanted by them all over again, and then I remembered that I had bought this collection of her stories from the Dorothy Project years ago, before I knew who Carrington was. I’d also like to read “Caliban and the Witch,” by Silvia Federici. I think they’d pair well.