Influences

• Books: All of Nabokov's novels but especially "Lolita," William Carlos Williams's "Spring and All," Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus," Steinbeck's novels, of course. Milton, Shakespeare, Kafka, Sartre, Ginsberg, Woolf, Joyce, Austen, Orwell, Carver, and so many more.

  Films: the Maysles brothers' "Grey Gardens," Errol Morris's "Gates of Heaven," Joe Berlinger's & Bruce Sinofsky's "Brother's Keeper." Not to mention Cassavetes, Scorcese, Coppola, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, and Fred Zinnemann
  

  Other: Mark Twain, Clark McKowen (a college prof), Bertrand Russell, Toni Morrison, Marianne Moore, Christopher Hitchens, Samuel Beckett, violinist Nadia Salerno-Sonenberg, John Donne, Emily Dickinson, Stereolab, and Beethoven (particularly his "Moonlight Sonata").

What I'm Reading

• I just finished Primo Levi's "Survival in Auschwitz," and will never be the same. Now I am tearing through his "The Drowned and the Saved," and then will have to take a break from Holocaust literature in order to recover. I started "Seeing," by Jose Saramago, but put it down after thirty pages. I'm in the middle of Mark Helprin's "Winter's Tale" and really admire his writing, and I've promised a friend I'd start "Kafka on the Shore," by Haruki Murakami soon, but I've got to read Salman Rushdie's "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" with Kyle (11). . . I don't have enough hours in the day to read the amount I want to read.

Web Links

• Veronica Chater's Home Page
• This American Life
• Publishers Marketplace