The L: For our readers who may not be familiar with your work, what’s the most accurate thing someone else has said about it?

O’Conner: One of the things that I have found most gratifying about the way my book has been represented by reviewers and blurbists so far is that every single one of them has commented both on the highly imaginative nature of my stories, and on what Karen Russell called their “core of genuine emotion.” As much as I love to play with language and ideas, it is consummately important to me that my readers feel my stories are honest and moving.

The L: What have you read/watched/listened to/looked at/ate recently that will permanently change our readers’ lives for the better?

O’Conner: It would be nice if any one work of art could permanently alter a person’s life—let alone for the better!—but I am not sure that is possible. I think we change constantly throughout life, and that no work of art, no matter how brilliant, is sure to make anyone a better person. I hope that reading Kafka, Tolstoy and Shakespeare has made me a better writer. Recently I have been reading a lot of Wallace Stevens, whom I hope is having a similar effect. But being a better writer is not at all the same as being a better person. I suppose that I think the best qualities in my character have been brought out by the people whom I love and who have loved me. Art is immensely important in life, but, obviously, it is not the most important thing.

The L: Whose ghostwritten celebrity tell-all (or novel) would you sprint to the store to buy (along with a copy of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, to balance it out)?

O’Conner: I hope this doesn’t sound snotty, but I would not rush to the store to buy any celebrity memoir or novel, especially one written by a ghostwriter. Life is too short to waste hours or days on any book that is not the result of passion, brilliance and original vision. Perhaps I feel this way because I am a very slow reader!

The L: Have you ever been a Starving Artist, and did it make you brilliant, or just hungry?

O’Conner: I’ve never starved, but I have certainly spent many years writing without knowing where my next rent check would come from. Mostly, I think, financial anxiety hurt my writing, because I felt so guilty about devoting so much time to something so unlikely to bring in cash, and because my anxiety in general made it hard for me to concentrate on my work. But it is true that penury was a sort of test. The fact that I couldn’t stop writing even under such circumstances told me a great deal about the seriousness of my desire to write, and so, in a certain way, ultimately made it easier for me to commit to the craft. It also helped me understand what a luxury it was to have the money/time (synonyms!) to write, and so made me determined to make the best use of every penny and moment I could.

The L: What would you characterize as an ideal interaction with a reader?

O’Conner: With my every image, sentence, paragraph and narrative turn, as well as with the story as a whole, I aim to get my reader to think, “Hunh?” and then, “Wow!” I want to present them with something they don’t quite understand at first, but are still intrigued by, and then I want to surprise them with the truth and/or beauty of that thing. If every element of a story allows the reader to understand the meaning or beauty of something that had once seemed obscure, then the story as a whole will just seem one long revelation and, I hope, a delight for the reader.

The L: Have you ever written anything that you’d like to take back?

O’Conner: It is my great good fortune that none of the miserable, dishonest, stupid and cliched writing that I have produced over my lifetime has ever found its way into print. Had any of it, I would probably have to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, wearing a false beard, sunglasses and an enormous hat.

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novel Kapitoil. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Time, Esquire, McSweeney’s, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in New York, and reads at the Freerange Nonfiction Reading Series at the Cornelia St. Cafe on July 7, and at Franklin Park‘s reading series on July 12.

The L: For our readers who may not be familiar with your work, what’s the most accurate thing someone else has said about it?
Wayne: I have no idea if Jonathan Franzen’s blurb is the most accurate assessment, but I’ve turned it into a facial tattoo: “Kapitoil is one of those uncommon novels that really is novel.Though the storytelling is conventional, it is satisfyingly so, and the book’s estimable young narrator is a human type whom nobody until Wayne was ever inspired to write about.”

The L: What have you read/watched/listened to/looked at/ate recently that will permanently change our readers’ lives for the better?
Wayne: Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs; MTV’s Warren the Ape; the gibberish song “Prisencolinensinainciusol” by Adriano Celentano; the abyss, which then looked back at me; my dog’s homework.

The L: Whose ghostwritten celebrity tell-all (or novel) would you sprint to the store to buy (along with a copy of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius to balance it out)?
Wayne: Pop Goes the Weasel: From Encino Man to Bio-Dome, My Meteoric Rise and, More Adjectivally Appropriate, Meteoric Fall, by Pauly Shore (ghostwritten by fellow early-90s MTV personalities Dan Cortese, Eric Nies, and&#8212so someone can handle the big words&#8212Kennedy).

The L: Have you ever been a Starving Artist, and did it make you brilliant, or just hungry?
Wayne: For just about anyone in this country who has the cultural advantages to write and publish fiction, it’s an elective poverty. Like most writers, I’ve had my tuna-fish-and-canned-soup periods. But it’s nowhere near hard times, so the only accrued wisdom comes from some meager identification with the financial anxieties of the rest of the world, and which soups have the most protein.

The L: What would you characterize as an ideal interaction with a reader?
Wayne: No names, no promises, no apologies; just raw, unfettered, all-night-long cuddling.

The L: Have you ever written anything that you’d like to take back?
Wayne: My first assignment for the former incarnation of Radar magazine was an elaborate prank in which I pretended to be a power-tool company representative who wanted Willie Aames, aka Buddy Lembeck from Charles in Charge, to endorse our power sander. I legally recorded the phone call and we put it on the website (accompanied by an animated film). The prank was “successful”&#8212he really wanted to do it and he was all for using his Christian children’s video-series superhero, Bibleman, to promote the sander (though he was a bit more dubious of my suggestion that we depict Bibleman “sanding off the heathens”). Yes, he’s a celebrity whose values clash with mine, but he’s also a human being I publicly made fun of. I resolved that any prank targets thereafter (military recruiters, college admissions officers, Second Life sex addicts) would remain fully anonymous. It’s off the site now, thankfully&#8212but if you’re reading this, Willie, I apologize.

Joshua Mohr is the author of Termite Parade, officially published today by Two Dollar Radio.

For our readers who may not be familiar with your work, what’s the most accurate thing someone else has said about it?
My ex-wife once called my writing “the lesser of two evils.” The other evil she was talking about was our sex life.

What have you read/watched/listened to/looked at/ate recently that will permanently change our readers’ lives for the better?
I live in San Francisco, which is renowned for clam chowder served out of sourdough bread bowls. A buddy turned me on to this restaurant down on the waterfront where you slip the bartender a few bucks on the sly and he’ll pour three shots of gin right into your bread bowl. You stir the booze in amongst the clams and potatoes. It’s by far the greatest thing I’ve ever tasted. Just make sure to eat/drink quickly, taking fast sips from your spoon before the dairy cements.

Whose ghostwritten celebrity tell-all (or novel) would you sprint to the store to buy (along with a copy of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius to balance it out)?
Since we live in a remix culture, why aren’t there more mash-up tell-alls? Who wouldn’t read a book about the lives of Don King, Britney Spears, Flavor Flav, and Hilary Clinton tossed in a blender and pureed beyond recognition? And then the reader has to infer which vignette fits into which person’s life. In fact, has anyone actually seen Flavor Flav and Hilary Clinton in the same room at the same time?

Have you ever been a Starving Artist, and did it make you brilliant, or just hungry?
Legend has it that Gary Larsen, mastermind of “The Far Side,” used to starve himself while he drew his comics—that his low blood sugar and general shaky, sweaty, palpitating demeanor helped his work achieve severe paroxysms of the imagination. I like this idea and regularly deprive myself of sustenance. Maybe it closes the gap between the subconscious and conscious mind. Or maybe it just keeps me from weighing 300 pounds.

What would you characterize as an ideal interaction with a reader?
My goal is to gloriously intrude into a reader’s life: make them brew coffee at midnight to devour the romp, make them neglect the next day’s responsibilities—late for work, kids whisked off with unruly cowlicks, speeding tickets, irate bosses, deadlines botched, all in the name of literature.

Have you ever written anything that you’d like to take back?
As most divorcees will confirm, I’d love to have those wedding vows back.

Ben Greenman’s new book is What He’s Poised to Do.

The L: For our readers who may not be familiar with your work, what’s the most accurate thing someone else has said about it?
Greenman: A friend of mine who is also a writer said that my stories are “funny sad you know.” She was just saying something in passing, an offhand remark. She may not even remember saying it. But I took it as a kind of manifesto. They are funny. They are sad. They are hopefully knowing. They implicate readers like inside jokes do, and as a result they exclude some readers too. I’ve never had a book of stories that passed with flying colors, by which I mean that any reader will love some, hate some, and be indifferent to some.

The L: What have you read/watched/listened to/looked at/ate recently that will permanently change our readers’ lives for the better?
Greenman: Oh, who am I to say? I have been spending lots of time with the Ramones album Too Tough To Die, from 1984. It’s a down record for Joey Ramone, who was in poor health, and a big up record for Dee Dee Ramone, who wrote most of the songs and even sang a few, including the great “Wart Hog.” It’s a pretty dark album with some great pop songs and a little more metallic (meaning less girl-group-sounding) than the first four records. There’s nothing as great as “Pinhead” or “California Sun” or “Rockaway Beach,” but the strong songs on this album, like the title song and “Mama’s Boy” and “I’m Not Afraid of Life,” are pretty great.

The L: Whose ghostwritten celebrity tell-all (or novel) would you sprint to the store to buy (along with a copy of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, to balance it out)?
Greenman: I must recuse myself because I ghostwrote the celebrity tell-all for Gene Simmons of KISS, which would have been on that list.

The L: Have you ever been a Starving Artist, and did it make you brilliant, or just hungry?
Greenman: Not starving, but I eat lots of food. I have always had a day job, I think. I came to New York and worked for Michael Wolff when he was publishing reference books about the internet. It was a great job with insanely long hours. Then I was freelancer for a bit, and that was pretty Starving Artist-y, and then I was a magazine editor. I’ve been at the New Yorker since 2000. My problem with being a freelancer/Starving Artist wasn’t so much the poverty as the fact that I fell too easily into the lack of discipline. I’d wake up at eleven, hang around until two in the afternoon listening to records and deciding whether to have pizza or a sandwich for lunch, and then beat myself up for not being productive enough.

The L: What would you characterize as an ideal interaction with a reader?
Greenman: I just want people to feel like they are getting either a moment of beauty or a moment of truth from my writing, or ideally both. I fully acknowledge the hubris of that statement&#8212who am I to dispense beauty or truth, let alone both?&#8212but that’s what would be ideal. It’s fiction, so they’re not getting information, as such, moved from my brain to them. I envy writers who set themselves to that task, to explain the Battle of the Bulge or the way that Curt Flood helped to create free agency. I don’t, or haven’t, worked that way. (And when I have, in the celebrity musicals I write, I tend to mock the whole process of information delivery.)

The L: Have you ever written anything that you’d like to take back?
Greenman: Maybe the answer to that last question. Oh, I know. Once as a young man I wrote a very negative review of an album by a prominent rock star. It was very mean-spirited. I think I called for his execution. Years later a newspaper was doing an article on me, and the photographer who came to take the picture was a friend of that rock star, and he told me that the mean review had really hurt the rock star’s feelings. It was a real shock to me that this rock star cared about what some punk said about him, and also a reminder that criticism stings, even if you are an established artist in your field. It changed the way I think about criticism slightly&#8212it’s not that I think people need to be nice all the time, but I hadn’t really bothered to hide the fact that I was hunting for sport, and that was probably the error of a young writer, committed out of arrogance or insensitivity, and I wish I could take that back.

Dorothea Lasky is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Black Life.

Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collection The Theory of Light and Matter, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and was recently republished in paperback by Vintage/Knopf. His fiction has appeared in One Story, Epoch The Pushcart Prize Anthology and on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.” He currently teaches creative writing at Trinity University in San Antonio.

For our readers who may not be familiar with your work, what’s the most accurate thing someone else has said about it?
One reviewer said, “These are fundamentally stories about the weight of memory.” And I think that’s pretty true.

What have you read/watched/listened to/looked at/ate recently that will permanently change our readers’ lives for the better?
Listened to: Deerhoof’s Offend Maggie (a brilliant album)
Read: On Chesil Beach (a beautiful, nearly perfect short novel)
Eaten: Mumford’s Barbeque in Victoria, Texas (delicious brisket!)
Looked at: Street Fight (a fascinating documentary about Cory Booker’s 2002 campaign against Sharpe James for mayor of Newark)

Whose ghostwritten celebrity tell-all (or novel) would you sprint to the store to buy (along with a copy of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius so that the checkout clerk doesn’t look at you screwy)?
J.D. Salinger. (Okay, I guess he’s more of a “literary celebrity,” but who wouldn’t want to know what he’s been up to?)

Have you ever been a Starving Artist, and did it make you brilliant, or just hungry?
It depends on how you define “starving.” I went through a period of time in my early twenties when I lived off Power Bars and Top Ramen, largely because they were both cheap and both filling, and I was able to survive on a food budget of about five dollars a day. The Power Bars might have given me a small creative boost, but the MSG in the Top Ramen made me sleepy, so I think they pretty much canceled each other out. In other words, no, it didn’t make me brilliant, just malnourished.

What would you characterize as an ideal interaction with a reader?
Probably my favorite thing is when I receive a random email from a reader who has no connection to me at all, someone who is just writing to tell me that they enjoyed my book. Those emails make my day.

Have you ever written anything that you’d like to take back?
Yes. I once let a magazine publish a short story that I knew wasn’t finished. When the story appeared in print, I found it hard to even look at the magazine’s cover without wincing. It was strange, but it felt worse than if the story had never been published at all. Since then, I’ve never done that again.

David Zweig is a writer and musician living in Brooklyn. He has released two albums, All Now With Wings and Keep Going.Zweig’s debut novel, Swimming Inside the Sun, was released fall 2009. Zweig, a former editor and researcher at multiple publications, including Vogue and Radar, is now at work on a documentary. He’s reading on January 5th at Perch in Park Slope.

For our readers who may not be familiar with your work, what’s the most accurate thing someone else has said about it?
I’m reluctant to say that flattering reviews are “accurate” (as much as I’d like to!), but I think this line from a Kirkus review captures what I aim for: “The author’s prose revels in smart literary turns… but it packs plenty of emotional resonance.”

What have you read/watched/listened to/looked at/ate recently that will permanently change our readers’ lives for the better?
I just finished Shop Class As Soulcraft, an engaging book about the rewards of skilled, manual labor. If you work in a cube and find it to be soul-killing bullshit, this book actually could be a life-changer for you.

Whose ghostwritten celebrity tell-all (or novel) would you sprint to the store to buy (along with a copy of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius so that the checkout clerk doesn’t look at you screwy)?
Plaxico Burress. I’m fascinated by the all-too-common mix of talent and self-destruction. [Note: I just looked on Amazon and Plax actually has a book, but it came out before he shot himself so it doesn’t count.]

Have you ever been a Starving Artist, and did it make you brilliant, or just hungry?
Never starving but years ago, when I attempted to start working on the novel, too poor to stay in my apartment, I lived in a drummer’s rehearsal space for six months. There was virtually no heat and I spent many a night sleeping with my winter coat on while fending off mice. When my wife (then-girlfriend)—who had a very nice apartment of her own—slept over despite all this I knew she was the one.

What would you characterize as an ideal interaction with a reader?
If I ever saw someone reading my book on the subway that would be pretty awesome. I think I’d feel like I really made it if that ever happens.

Have you ever written anything that you’d like to take back?
A few indignant emails.

Kevin Killian is the author, most recently, of the short story collection Impossible Princess.

For our readers who may not be familiar with your work, what’s the most accurate thing someone else has said about it?
Dennis Cooper wrote that “Kevin Killian is the greatest unsung genius in contemporary American literature.” Part of me thinks, “That seems about right,” but of course he is being very very kind.

What have you read/watched/listened to/looked at/ate recently that will permanently change our readers’ lives for the better?
I’ve read the new biography of Sybil Thorndike (A Star of Life, by Jonathan Croall)—it’s cool; I’ve watched the film (Untitled), a biting satire of the contemporary art world; I’ve listened to Glen Campbell’s 1964 single “Guess I’m Dumb,” written and produced by Brian Wilson; I’ve looked at the giant monograph the Philadelphia Museum put out on Duchamp’s Etant Donnes; I’ve eaten a new kind of supposedly organic marshmallow—and most of these things I’ve reviewed on Amazon, where I maintain my originary status as one of Amazon’s top 100 reviewers more or less by telling what I think about everything.

Whose ghostwritten celebrity tell-all (or novel) would you sprint to the store to buy (along with a copy of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius so that the checkout clerk doesn’t look at you screwy)?
L Magazine’s readers keen on the poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965) might queue up for the 1961 memoir Twelve Dead Geese by Eugene de Thassy. 12DG is the heartwarming story of a Hungarian boy’s flight from Communist tyranny into a postwar Paris filled with glamour, gorgeous women, and geese, and it was partially written by Spicer during a period of poverty De Thassy’s handouts helped to alleviate. (What a sentence!) Some of it has that Unbearable Lightness of Being charm to it. But De Thassy wasn’t a celebrity per se, so let me think again. Oh! I understand that Raquel Welch is coming out with a tell-all memoir. I’ll vote for that, she is a goddess.

Have you ever been a Starving Artist, and did it make you brilliant, or just hungry?
I’m old enough to remember the days when one could pay the rent in a horrid Manhattan apartment merely by selling one’s blood. The blood banks wouldn’t let you come in more than once a week, but there were four of them in a neat ring all around Times Square, so you could rotate and go four times a week, eating lots of doughnuts in between. It didn’t make me brilliant, but I was very light-headed.

What would you characterize as an ideal interaction with a reader?
A reader in the Midwest read my story, “Spurt,” that’s in Impossible Princess, when it first appeared in an anthology Michael Lowenthal edited. Some time later Michael forwarded me a letter of complaint from the reader. He (Midwestern guy) had been on a public bus going to work, reading Michael’s anthology, and my story grew so grotesque and upsetting that he, an epileptic, had thrown a fit and wound up wetting the pants of his best suit. Now he wanted his dry-cleaning bill paid. To this day I rate that bill as the zenith of interactivity with my readers.

Have you ever written anything you’d like to take back?
Ha, I was tricked once by a print arts journal whose editors asked the contribitors to submit our “juvenilia. It was all going to be good fun. Was I ever shocked to see that every one of the contributors, but me, chose to regard as their juvenilia their very first poem they got published in The New Yorker or whatever, whereas the editors printed a facsimile version of a “novel” my cousin and I wrote when we were eight and nine years old. It was called Purple Death. Who looked sillier then? But I guess I wouldn’t not have wanted to have written Purple Death, so let me think about this regret thing some more. Didn’t Chaucer ultimately recant the Canterbury Tales? Maybe our older selves should be forcibly removed from our younger selves, to protect all parties.