Do let me know if any link is dead or misplaced. If you ask nicely, I’ll explain what I’ve taken from each person. Some people influenced only a single project or merely gave me implicit permission to create in a certain way; others colored entire eras of my life and drilled so deep into my head that they permeate the way I see, hear, and feel.
Kōbō Abe, André Aciman, James Agee, Svetlana Alexievich, Nelson Algren, Dante Alighieri, Pablo Amaringo, Paul Thomas Anderson, Piers Anthony, Homer Aridjis, Antonin Artaud, Inio Asano, Erich Auerbach, Steve Aylett, Ingeborg Bachmann, Francis Bacon, Nicholson Baker, Amiri Baraka, Attila Bartis, Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, Dale Beran, David Berman, Thomas Bernhard, Jhonn Bhalance, James Blackshaw, William Blake, Maurice Blanchot, Roberto Bolaño, Archipelago Books, The New York Review of Books, Wayne C. Booth, Jorge Luis Borges, Hieronymus Bosch, Isaac Brock, David Thomas Broughton, Charles Bukowski, Vashti Bunyan, Anna Burns, Italo Calvino, George Carlin, Thomas Carlyle, Ray Carney, Leonora Carrington, Angela Carter, Raymond Carver, John Cassavetes, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Kowloon Walled City, Diane Cluck, Alice Coltrane, Dave Cooper, Julio Cortazar, Robert Crumb, Mark L. Danielewski, Henry Darger, Sarah Davachi, Guy Debord, Don DeLillo, Alabaster DePlume, Thomas De Quincey, Deutero-Isaiah, Philip K. Dick, Stephen Dobyns, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Philippe Druillet, Marguerite Duras, Andrea Dworkin, T.S. Eliot, Warren Ellis, Steven Ellison, Phil Elvrum, Elena Ferrante, Penelope Fitzgerald, Gustave Flaubert, Harry Frankfurter, Ron Fricke, John Frusciante, Northrop Frye, William Gaddis, Neil Gaiman, William Gass, Andrei Georgescu, Alex Gianniscoli, Allen Ginsberg, Witold Gombrowicz, Peter Greenaway, Michihiko Hachiya, Thomas Hardy, Marlen Haushofer, Charles Hayes, Sadegh Hedayat, Heraclitus, Marta Hillers, Homer, J.K. Huysmans, Kazuo Ishiguro, Shirley Jackson, Juraj Jakubisko, William James, Elfriede Jelinek, Denis Johnson, James Joyce, Norton Juster, Franz Kafka, Shintaro Kago, Ilya Kaminsky, Sarah Kane, Charlie Kaufman, Susan Te Kahurangi King, Keiichi Koike, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Giorgios Lanthimos, Ryan Larkin, Comte de Lautreamont, Gareth Liddiard, José Lezama Lima, Alphonse Lingis, Clarice Lispector, Helen MacDonald, David Markson, Jeff Mangum, Greil Marcus, Chris Marker, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, George R. R. Martin, Jordaan Mason, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Cormac McCarthy, Winsor McCay, Mark McGuire, Robert McKee, Carlton Mellick III, Efrim Menuck, Thomas Metzinger, Henry Miller, Yukio Mishima, Kentaro Miura, Hideo Miyazaki, Gustave Moreau, Antonio Moresco, Herta Müller, Haruki Murakami, Gerald Murnane, Robert Musil, Joanna Newsom, Friedrich Nietzsche, Flann O’Brien, Silvino Ocampo, Eichiro Oda, Lennon Olivia, Katushiro Otomo, Octavio Paz, Mervyn Peake, Georges Perec, Fernando Pessoa, Harold Pinter, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Dalkey Archive Press, Marcel Proust, Thomas Pynchon, Jaime R., Raymond Roussel, Gena Rowlands, Arundhati Roy, Patti Smith, Joe Sacco, Oliver Sacks, Stig Saetarbakken, Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, Fabian Scheidler, Bruno Schulz, W.G. Sebald, Anne Sexton, David Shields, Iain Sinclair, Christina Stead, Laurence Sterne, R.L. Stine, Wilma Stockenström, Jon Stone, Andrei Tarkovsky, Lawry Joseph Tilbury, George Trakl, Magdalena Tulli, Amos Tutuola, Naoki Urusawa, Remedios Varo, Martin Vaugh-James, Jeff Vandermeer, Boris Vian, Don Van Vliet, Kurt Vonnegut, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Nathaniel West, Patrick White, Stefan White, Walt Whitman, Richard Williams, Saul Williams, Thomas Wolfe, Tom Wolfe, Jan Wolkers, Jim Woodring, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Young, Masaaki Yuasa, Andrzej Zulawski, and most especially the three authors I have read and reread and rereread with a sense of elation and universal springtime of the linguistic imagination: Alan Moore, Mircea Cărtărescu, and David Foster Wallace.