Not every book is a great work of literature, but that doesn’t mean literary authors don’t have fun reading some pulpy genre books. Over at Electric Literature, Amber Sparks confesses to drawing inspiration from Dean Kuntz and Stephen King before speaking with other authors about their less-than-literary influences. Laura van den Berg? She loved reading National Enquirer. Erika Wurth? Pierss Anthony’s fantasy books. Even the most erudite authors have some lowbrow tastes:
I discovered, as I talked to lots of writers, that the vocabulary of the lowbrow almost universally reflects a kind of throwaway culture: garbage, disposable, trash. Yet it’s clear many of us have never tossed out these first and primary influences—they are anything but disposable when we look back at where it all began.
