Bruce Wagner's 6 favorite books

Bruce Wagner is the author of Dead Stars, Memorial, The Chrysanthemum Palace (a PEN/Faulkner fiction award finalist), Still Holding, I’ll Let You Go, I’m Losing You, Force Majeure, and two companion novellas under the title The Empty Chair.

One of his six favorite books, as shared with readers of The Week magazine:

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

What can one say about Don Quixote's transcendent, comedic search? Dostoyevsky was said to have remarked that Don Quixote was the saddest book ever written. It is perhaps the most beautiful as well.

Read about another book on the list. 

Don Quixote was the second most popular book among prisoners at the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay. It is on Panayiota Kuvetakis's top ten list of fictional best friends we'd like to have as nonfictional best friends, and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best literary women dressed as men and ten of the best books written in prison.

Paul Auster always returns to Don Quixote; Claire Messud hasn't read it.

--Marshal Zeringue