The author, most recently, of “Lincoln in the Bardo” on his favorite genre: “I love reading anything about gigantic animate blobs of molten iron who secretly long to be concert pianists.”

What books are currently on your night stand?

I am finishing up Michael Chabon’s miraculous “Moonglow” and picking away at Woody Guthrie’s strange “House of Earth,” which contains one of the best, slowest, hottest, yet most quotidian sex-in-a-barn scenes ever. Loving “Ghettoside,” by Jill Leovy. Although it’s too large for my night stand, I am lingering with pleasure over Nick Offerman’s “Good Clean Fun,” which is not only instructing me in a calm yet passionate view toward life and art, but also might eventually help me to build a bigger, more capacious night stand.

What’s the last great book you read?

I loved Zadie Smith’s “Swing Time” for its scale and heart and moral ambition and the high-wire act she does (and yet so casually) with language. “The Argonauts,” by Maggie Nelson: mind-blowingly heartful and had me weeping on a plane. “Between the World and Me,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates: a beautiful proof that the truth told urgently always yields poetry. Mike Royko’s classic “Boss”: a sketch of Richard J. Daley and his Chicago that reads like a crazed postmodern novel and brought back all kinds of happy memories of my Chicago childhood. “The Attention Merchants,” by Tim Wu, reconfigured my understanding of what our time is really about; i.e., the conscious theft of the individual’s privacy and self-possession in the name of moving product and empowering shareholders. I go back to David Sedaris’s “Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls” before trying to write anything ostensibly comic, just to recalibrate myself to greatness. Philip Glass’s memoir, “Words Without Music,” had a powerful effect on me — made me resolve to believe in the power of art more fully and be less hesitant to take chances.

What’s the best classic novel you recently read for the first time?

I had somehow missed “Sula,” by Toni Morrison, and what a delight that was: a page-by-page walk-through of the way a truly great human mind thinks and reasons and invents and celebrates and mourns. I was thrilled by the genuine but meaningful strangeness of Shirley Jackson’s “We Have Always Lived in the Castle.” Tolstoy’s “Resurrection” might be the darkest novel I’ve ever read — basically, a slow descent down from privilege and power into the terror and cruelty that comes of poverty and ritual oppression. (I know, it sounds bleak but. . . .)