"I would would love to teach any of the Russians including guys like Babel. Definitely Wilde and Virginia Woolf. I would want to do Illustrated Man by Bradbury. Mafouz, Naipaul, Saramogo, oh and Crab Walk by Günter Grass as a weird interesting look at WWII. Plath is wonderful. I could go on. For me I want to deal with books that in Kafka's words 'wound and stab us.'"—My favorite high school teacher emailing in response to this.*

*I went to a generally mediocre Catholic high school but every mediocre school has that one cool karate-teaching hardware store-moonlighting teacher whose lectures you would actually rather listen to (obligatory dating of self) than Anderson Cooper on Channel 1 and this one was it.