From “Useful Delusions,” by Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler, about why lying to ourselves can be good, to Adam Grant’s “Think Again,” about how we can reset our preconceived notions.
In decades past, the Book Review occasionally asked young authors about their biggest influences. For our 125th anniversary, we put the question to a new generation.
“I get superstitious. I once had a book sent to me that was disrupting my ability to write a novel because of a superficial similarity between the two. I took that book and dug a hole and buried it deep in the backyard.”
The protagonist of the author’s latest work, “Antiquities,” recounts his obsession with Egyptian artifacts and his boyhood friendship with an unusual classmate.