Dissection

From The Secret Miracle, edited by Daniel Alarcon:

Is there a novel you go back to again and again? If so, why? What does it teach you?

Susan Choi: There are certain novels that, for whatever reason, become inextricably bound up with certain projects of mine, and I read them so intensely for that period that I sort of demolish them. This happened to me with The Great Gatsby while I was writing American Woman. The uncoiling spring of that book’s plot, the awful momentum that takes hold of the ch...