For this week’s edition of “Inspired By,” we are featuring Elizabeth Eslami, author of the short story collection, Hibernate! Her writing has appeared in several literary publications and anthologies including The Literary Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Tremors: New Fiction By Iranian American Writers. She lives in the Greater New York City Area where she teaches in the MFA Program at Manhattanville College and works at the Tupelo Quarterly as senior prose editor.

Hibernate is available for purchase on Paperback and Kindle.

 

Here, Elizabeth explains why the following five books made her want to become an author.

 

Paul Auster’s Moon Palace

“First love affair, the summer before I left for college. I found it for free on the top shelf of a now-shuttered used bookstore in my hometown, the cover sliced clean through. I loved the richness of the multi-layered narrative, the embedded stories, that he used a real painting, the wild turn into the desert, and proud, floundering Marco Stanley Fogg. I devoured all of Auster’s work after, but none of the books ever worked on me quite like Moon Palace. I taught it a couple of years ago, hoping to spread the fever.”

 

 

Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help

“For ‘How to Become a Writer,’ like the rest of my undergrad cohort. Everybody wanted to be Lorrie Moore. I remember the exact moment: sitting in the theater at Sarah Lawrence before a film noir class, reading it and staring at the soles of some girl’s feet in front of me. I had that second person voice in my head, so smart and funny, and I couldn’t stop hearing it, couldn’t stop seeing this girl’s great big feet squeezed into tiny, black ballet flats.”

 

Aimee Bender’s The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

“I read both Bender and Moore in Danzy Senna’s fiction workshop, and I remember bursting into Danzy’s office one day and saying in a peculiar, over exuberant voice how much I loved Flammable Skirt, how I wanted to write stories like these. Danzy introduced us to so many wonderful writers. Even writers I didn’t appreciate as much then, but would later: Sherwood Anderson, Richard Brautigan, Paul Bowles.”

 

John Milton’s Paradise Lost

“I’m cheating by including an epic poem, though I could have just as easily chosen Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I loved both equally. I was introduced to Milton in high school – along with Frankenstein – by an extraordinary English teacher, and for a teenager, even one wading through dense blank verse, Milton’s imagery was a kick in the head. Satan, as tragic figure and villain and sometime anti-hero, his words dripping into Eve’s ear, was just as enthralling for me as Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden would be, years later, playing binary to the Kid. Grand scale storytelling and language as gold as that stuff dripping from demonic lips.”

 

Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son

“Another story collection by way of Danzy Senna. If Bender’s book was wild and sexy, Johnson’s was a grimy diamond straight out of the muck. In a workshop full of privileged Sarah Lawrence girls, we all wanted to write like Denis Johnson. A book like Jesus’ Son showed just how little we knew about a cruel world we were so intent on pretending we were a part of. The best writers do just this, of course; they teach you how to write and they teach you how to look way past your periphery.”

Pinterest PS! Don’t forget to check out this Pinterest board inspired by Hibernate!