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Terrence Holt is a physician, former literature professor, and the author of an acclaimed story collection, In the Valley of the Kings. His first novel, Soldiers & Sailors, follows a doctor who is transformed when he begins working at a veterans home.

‘The Mennyms’ series by Sylvia Waugh (1993–96)

Waugh wrote this series because “the world is too cynical, too lacking in magic.” Marketed as children’s fiction and anything but, the books offer a deep and serious consideration of what it means to be alive. I don’t think I’ve ever been so profoundly moved by any series fiction. Buy it here.

‘The Complete Morgaine’ by C.J. Cherryh (2015)

Morgaine displays all of Cherryh’s extraordinary gifts: powerful writing, propulsive plotting, complex human (and alien) characters in fully elaborated worlds tantalizingly similar to our own. Were she not a genre writer, she’d be on her way to Stockholm to pick up her Nobel. Buy it here.

‘Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov’ translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2000)

A doctor and a writer of deceptively simple, risk-taking short stories (who else could get away with “A Boring Story”?), Chekhov has been the godfather of most of the short fiction written in English in the past century. Buy it here.

‘The Heart Sutra’

One of the foundational texts of Buddhism. I can’t claim to understand half of its few hundred words, but any sacred text (or is it a philosophical tract?) that states “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” is something every writer should know by heart. Buy it here.

‘The Odyssey’ by Homer, translated by Richmond Lattimore (1965)

Homer’s adventure story has been my favorite work of fiction since I first learned to read. This lucid translation makes no apologies for preserving Homer’s (to us) nonidiomatic constructions. Reading it, I feel as if I’m in touch with a mind that, after 2,500 years, still leaves such clear traces of its utterly alien world and its immediately familiar humanity. Buy it here.

‘The Book of Job’ (King James translation, 1611)

I’m not remotely religious, but I return to the Hebrew Bible almost as often as I do The Odyssey. The tale of Job’s suffering, in a world determined by an inscrutable power, tackles the most important thing I know about being human, in words so beautiful they give me chills. And in the King James translation, I feel like I’m at the springhead of modern English. Buy it here.