At a recent event, the novelist Marlon James was asked to name a book by another author that he wished he'd written. He picked Dogeaters, Jessica Hagedorn's 1990 novel about the Philippines. Although it is set in Manila during the rule of Ferdinand Marcos, James couldn't help thinking of Jamaica, the country he grew up in, as he read it. 'I thought: She knows Kingston,' he said. What he meant was that her book helped him better see the beauty, thrum, and chaos of the Jamaican capital, which would become the setting for his Booker Prize'winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. Gary Shteyngart made a similar discovery about the slipperiness of literary inspiration when he traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, for The Atlantic, seeking traces of the Nobel Prize'winning author J. M. Coetzee. He was hunting for clues to decipher the author's parable-like novels in the homes Coetzee had lived in and the streets he had walked'but Shteyngart learned more from discovering what the...
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