more so than traditional literature, performance and installation art. In his twenties, under the name Paul French, Martone self-published the book The Numberless, the sole copy of which exists within the confines of a rural shed in Fort Wayne, Indiana, nailed page by page to the walls, windows, and rafters, in a random, unnumbered order. More recently, he has been working on the sequel to this piece in an abandoned carton factory on the outskirts of Tuscaloosa. Martone has also written a number of fictional interviews with his mentor John Barth, as well as fictional advertisements in the margins of magazines such as McSweeney’s, Black Warrior Review and Nashville Review. Influences In a 2007 interview with Fred Arroyo (now collected in Unconventions), Martone provides a list of major influences, cataloguing figures not only from literary fiction but also popular musicians, visual artists, and television personalities, explaining that, to him it seems "the assumptions about influences often suggest the notion of a Gatsby-like program of improvement. The writer only reads 'good' books that contribute to his or her scheme of perfection ... Whatever I am up to as a writer has come about mainly by accident, inertia, and least resistance." Throughout other interviews, Martone reiterates a number of the same names and also mentions several others, occasionally expanding on why these writers are important for him. What follows is a partial list gleaned from these interviews. Hugh Kenner Roy Behrens Lewis Hyde Lawrence Weschler Chuck Jones Cindy Sherman Yma Sumac Raymond Loewy Tom Waits Mister Rogers Captain Kangaroo Gertrude Stein O. Winston Link Edith Hamilton La Jetée J. G. Ballard Duplex Planet Harvey Pekar Samuel Beckett Jorge Luis Borges Donald Barthelme Italo Calvino William Gass WOWO (AM) Joseph Cornell John Barth Thucydides The Big Book (Alcoholics Anonymous) Thomas Kuhn Philo T. Farnsworth Chester Carlson Thomas Hardy Stanley Elkin Cole Porter Alfred Kinsey Saki Works At a Loss, 1977 (prose poems) Alive and Dead in Indiana, 1984 (fiction) Return to Powers, 1985 (nonfiction) Safety Patrol, 1988 (fiction) A Place of Sense: Pieces of the Midwest, 1988 (editor) Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List, 1990 (fiction) Townships: Pieces of the Midwest, 1992 (editor) Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List [Revised and Expanded], 1992 (fiction) Pensées: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle, 1994 (fiction) Seeing Eye, 1995 (fiction) The Flatness and Other Landscapes, 1999 (nonfiction) The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction: Fifty