[Each Monday for the next few months, one of our contributors will match a great book with a time in their lives; keep up with this series, or any of our others, through our Special Features page.]

I loved Empire Falls when I was revising my first novel.  That is, I love it right now.  When I started drafting the novel this past December, I made it a point to immerse myself in the best fiction ever written.  I revisited Nabokov, Steinbeck, threw in a little Cheever and V.S. Naipaul, and then school started again.  I’m currently halfway through my three-year MFA program, and last semester, I signed up for a Premodern Narrative class – and by that I mean works like Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.  I eventually switched out of the class in favor of an entire semester of Leaves of Grass, but not before Bede knocked some sense into me:  I’d been going about my “research” backwards. …
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