In 1997, I stumbled across a glowing account by Jay Parini, in The New York Times Book Review, of a posthumous story collection that had just been published by Houghton Mifflin. The book was The Springs of Affection, by Irish-born author Maeve Brennan. Over the years I had searched used book shops in hunt of unknown or forgotten Irish and Irish-American authors, bagging treasures by the likes of Jack Dunphy, Edward McSorley and J.F. Powers, but I had never seen anything by Brennan. Intrigued by the review, I purchased a copy of what Parini described as, “a book full of small miracles presented in elegant but simple prose.” When, in 2004, Hurricane Charlie ripped across Florida, ultimately tearing off part of my roof and leaving a pile of water-logged books in his wake, I made a hasty, last-minute evacuation. The Springs of Affection was the first book I rescued off my shelves.

Illustration by Jeff Crosby

It’s Sunday evening in Petaluma, California, the former Egg Capital of the World, the current World’s Wristwrestling Capital and the site of the World’s Ugliest Dog Championship. I’m eating supper in a gas station that’s been converted into a taqueria when in walks a big man wearing a black cap, black jeans and a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt. He is carrying a small child who’s wearing pajamas decorated with pictures of dinosaurs. The jukebox is blasting mariachi music. The man twirls around several times on his boot heels with the happy child then comes to a stop in front of the cash register. I watch this bit of choreography then go back to my chimichanga, and to Norwood, Charles Portis’ first novel.

Photo courtesy of West Virginia State Archives

Stumbling onto Mary Lee Settle’s work was a definitive moment in my life. I was browsing in the stacks of the Washington, D.C., Public Library in 1995, and I spotted a book titled O Beulah Land. Having grown up singing the hymn, I couldn’t resist a peek at the book. The moment I opened it and began to scan its pages, I knew I had “come home,” as the old hymns say. I had found a writer not only to read, to admire, but also to learn from. I had found my mentor.

Illustration by DG Strong

I was looking for the book equivalent of comfort food when I began reading Barbara Pym’s novels six years ago. “Which threat color is it today?” I wondered each morning, packing my briefcase with bottled water, flashlight, and cell phone. I live in Chicago, and there was a long period when the news reports kept hinting we might face a terrifying subway emergency en route to work. Pym’s books helped me to forget about all that. Her London novels remind us that, even in a big city, life is broken down into neighborhoods, parishes, business offices; each of these, seen through Pym’s honest and benevolent gaze, takes on the spirit of a country village, where effortless humor can be found at church bazaars and dull anthropology lectures, and a thrill can be felt upon the arrival of an attractive new neighbor.

For aspiring writers, Pym’s body of work offers an added gift: The story of her roller-coaster ride career gives us all hope for some success (just one published book, who would begrudge a person this?) before death summons us from our laptops.

Photo courtesy of Carol McMahon

I don’t know how I forgot the sex, but I did.

I first entered the church of Thomas McMahon about fifteen years ago when I came across his novel Loving Little Egypt (1987), a cabinet of wonders made of words in which a nearly blind phone phreak named Mourly Vold monkey-wrenches the national telephone system in the 1920s. Once I read it, I was like a Jehovah’s Witness with “The Watchtower.” I stood on street corners and knocked on doors imploring people to read McMahon’s genius book. I sat down at strangers’ tables in cafes and recited paragraphs. I stormed into friends’ living rooms and pressed copies on them (some became converts themselves and took to the boulevards, proselytizing lost souls who in turn became devotees, and so on). And I rampaged through used bookstores looking for McMahon’s other two works of fiction: the gawkily titled Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry: A Novel (1971) and McKay’s Bees (1979).