SUSAN SCARF MERRELL
When I use this method as a teaching tool, I can help students see what choices an artist has made. What is hidden but can be seen; what has been left as a gap in time or action; how the author’s stance vis-à-vis the story has been carefully staged.

MARGOT KAHN AND KELLY MCMASTERS
It’s really about the small moments, rather than having the perfect architecture— because, like Margot said, you can be on the fault line and the whole world can crumble.

MICHAEL BYERS
The house in Hewer was three stories, much larger than they needed, and full of odd vacancies, as though the Jenkinses, from whom Paul and his wife were subletting, had planned to be away much longer than a single semester.

OLGA ZILBERBOURG
It felt foreordained to open this short story collection by the Norwegian writer Gunnhild Øyehaug and find IKEA on the first page, as in: “…park the car outside IKEA.” IKEA, now based in the Netherlands, originated in Sweden, but to many foreigners, it personifies Scandinavia—pleasant and unthreatening.

JULIA PIKE
Finally, it was finished: a hulking, rustic cube of gray-painted wood with huge windows all along the front. In daylight, the house looks haunted—a gray shack with empty dark eyes—but at night, when the yellow lamps are on in the living room and the chimney tosses sparks out into the night sky, the house beckons you in from the cold. The parents were all Tolkien fans, and so they called the house Rivendell: the last safe place for the elves.

MENSAH DEMARY
Disney, the warship, captured the Star Wars universe, firing off in quick succession two movies: The Force Awakens, which continues the picking-over of the Skywalker family bones, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story—a side quest between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope.

RALPH SNEEDEN
At the boarding school where I teach, my campus residence bears a plaque with the name of an English teacher who drowned after falling through ice.

ELVIS BEGO
There was a frightening lustiness in their yard and the little river that loitered a few hundred yards away, brimming with crucian carp. That tumescent hum of multitude. When night fell, I’d light a fat candle and feel pretty romantic, with my ink-stained fingers and the whirring dark.

When I was a boy, my grandfather, Domenico Preziosi, lived on Route 110, a double-barreled commercial strip in Huntington, New York, on Long Island, its cacophony a rousing anthem of people engaged in the business of living.

Every so often a contemporary novel makes me want to go back to college—not because I don’t get it, but because the book induces a craving to know everything about its world.