What sorts of books inspired you as a child?

I read voraciously as a child, everything from novels to poetry to Tintin comics to books on the history of baseball. When I was about 11, a neighbour gave me his collection of Sports Illustrated back issues, and I devoured some of the previous decade¡¯s best sports journalism. Around the same time, I read Louise Fitzhugh¡¯s Harriet the Spy and was struck by the title character¡¯s determination to read the entire Sunday New York Times every weekend ¨C so I started trying to do that, too. I¡¯ve been enjoying rediscovering children¡¯s classics reading to my young children: C. S. Lewis¡¯ Chronicles of Narnia; E. L. Konigsburg¡¯s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler; Roald Dahl¡¯s Danny, the Champion of the World (which I have fond memories of my father reading to me); and E. B. White¡¯s The Trumpet of the Swan.

Your new book ¡®Epistrophies¡¯ explores ¡®jazz and the literary imagination¡¯. What were the first writings about jazz or its milieu that attracted your interest?

I discovered Langston Hughes¡¯ poetry and Ralph Ellison¡¯s Invisible Man as a teenager; but perhaps the most important catalysts were two books I discovered in college: Black Music, Amiri Baraka¡¯s 1967 collection of articles and record reviews, and Bedouin Hornbook, Nathaniel Mackey¡¯s 1986 serial epistolary fiction, both of which I used as discographical prompts and listening guides. But I was also fascinated with writings by musicians, from interviews to liner notes on LPs (which I discuss in Epistrophies) to autobiographies such as Charles Mingus¡¯ Beneath the Underdog.

Which books do you believe capture most vividly the experience of listening to music?

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Ralph Ellison¡¯s essays (collected in Living with Music); James Baldwin¡¯s story Sonny¡¯s Blues; Gayl Jones¡¯ novel Corregidora; Geoff Dyer¡¯s But Beautiful; Fred Moten¡¯s The Feel Trio; and Chapter 23 of Julio Cort¨¢zar¡¯s Hopscotch.

Which books about or by musicians would you recommend?

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Sidney Bechet¡¯s Treat It Gentle; George Lewis¡¯ A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music; Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words; John Cage¡¯s Silence; The?Glenn Gould Reader; Jean-Jacques Schuhl¡¯s Ingrid Caven; and Robin Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times ?of an American Original.

What was the last book you gave as a gift, and to whom?

One of my favourite works of jazz literature (and a book I write about in Epistrophies) is Coming through Slaughter, Michael Ondaatje¡¯s brilliant and kaleidoscopic 1976 novel about the legendary New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden. I recently gave a copy to my friend the novelist Valeria Luiselli, some of whose work has a similar fragmented form and archival sensibility.

What books do you have on your desk waiting to be read?

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Marlon James¡¯ A?Brief History of Seven Killings; Anne Carson¡¯s Float; Darby English¡¯s 1971: A?Year in the Life of Color; Clarice Lispector¡¯s The Complete Stories; Leah Dickerman and Achim Borchardt¡¯s Robert Rauschenberg; and Scholastique Mukasonga¡¯s Coeur Tambour.

Brent Hayes Edwards is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and the author of Epistrophies: Jazz ?and the Literary Imagination.