The Pleasure of Influence is a collection of conversations with eleven of the most important male fiction writers in America today. In this collection, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler; National Book Award winner Charles Johnson; National Book Award nominees Thom Jones, Barry Hannah, and Stephen Dixon; as well as Russell Banks, Rick Moody, Chris Offutt, Stewart O'Nan, Steve Erickson, and Gordon Lish candidly discuss the origin, process, and achievement of their own fiction in a manner that should appeal to readers, writers, and scholars of modern American fiction.