Monica Berlin, poet and creative writing instructor,ex-waitress/bartender born and raised in the city of Chicago.
Passionately teaches Literature and Writing in small college town Illinois. Planning, someday, to plant a garden filled with nothing
but thyme and tulips, and to write long poems that everyone will want to publish and pay lots of money for so that her frisbie
loving husband can play more golf and take a whole weekend off.

My book list by order of introduction, not influence:

84 Charing Cross Road - Helene Hanff
A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway
The Sound and The Fury - William Faulkner
AVA - Carole Maso
Patterns of Childhood/Kindheitsmuster - Christa Wolf
The Waves - Virginia Woolf
The Book of Promethea/Le Livre de Promethea - Helene Cixous
At the Bottom of the River - Jamaica Kincaid
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Reader's Block - David Markson

Jeremy  and I believe that Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried deserves mention. But neither of us was willing to bump any
book off our list for O'Brien nor willing to have it ignored