A.E. asked Amor Towles:

Your writing voice is breathtaking. I was wondering, what kind of literature did you grow up reading?

Amor Towles Dear Anna,
I am 55 years old. So, at this point, I have been a close reader of serious fiction for almost 40 years - and my influences are far and wide. But here are some of my favorite books:

Jane Austen
Sense & Sensibility; Pride & Prejudice
Italo Calvino
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler; Invisible Cities
Raymond Carver
Cathedral; also the Collected Stories from the Library of America
Raymond Chandler
The Big Sleep; The collected works from the Library of America
Anton Chekhov
The Collected Short Stories
Joseph Conrad
Victory; Nostromo; and the rest!
Fyodor Doestoevsky
Crime and Punishment; Brothers Karamazov; The Idiot
George Eliot
Middlemarch
William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying; the Sound and the Fury; the collected works from the Library of America
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night; The Beautiful and The Damned
Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary
Ford Maddox Ford
The Good Soldier
Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon; The collected works from the Library of America
Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls; A Farewell to Arms; In Our Times
Henry James
Washington Square; Portrait of a Lady
Franz Kafka
The works.
William Kennedy
Ironweed; Legs Diamond; Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game
Milan Kundera
The Unbearable Lightness of Being; The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Naguib Mahfouz
The Cairo Trilogy
Thomas Mann
Buddenbrooks; The Magic Mountain
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera; Chronicle of a Death Foretold; Autumn of the Patriarch
Harry Matthews
Cigarettes
Peter Matthiessen
Killing Mr. Watson; Far Tortuga
Cormac McCarthy
All the Pretty Horses; No Country for Old Men; Blood Meridien
Carson McCullers
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Herman Melville
Moby Dick
Toni Morrison
Song of Solomon; The Bluest Eye; Beloved
Flannery O’Connor
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Philip Roth
American Pastoral; Human Stain,
Paul Scott
The Raj Quartet (all 4 volumes)
John Steinbeck
Grapes of Wrath
Leo Tolstoy
War & Peace; Anna Karenina
Eudora Welty
Delta Wedding
Edith Wharton
House of Mirth; Custom of the Country; Age of Innocence
Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway; To The Lighthouse; Orlando

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