Ivan Doig was born in Montana in 1939 and grew up along the Rocky Mountain Front, the dramatic landscape that has inspired much of his writing. A recipient of a lifetime Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association, he is the author of eight previous novels, most recently The Whistling Season, and three works of nonfiction, including This House of Sky. His latest book is The Eleventh Man, to be published October 18 by Harcourt. He lives in Seattle.

On your nightstand now:  

The King's English by Betsy Burton. Adventures in bookselling by Salt Lake City's La Pasionara of literature.

Favorite book when you were a child:  

Comic books. When we would come to town from ranch work on Saturday night, my dad would empty all the dimes and nickels out of his pocket, and I would race to the drugstore to buy "funny books." Funny or outlandish ("Amazing!" usually blood-red on the cover), they lit my imagination in the total absence of children's classics in our tumbleweed way of life. And I can still tell when a comic-strip cartoonist is vamping it and when the drawn lines thrum with blood from the heart.

Your top five authors:

William Faulkner, for the unvanquished audacity of his language and characterizations. Isak Dinesan: her delicately sly handling of magic and romance brings out the fabulous in human fables. Ismail Kadare, who outlasted the Iron Curtain nightmare that was Albania to give us such profoundly universal novels as Chronicle in Stone, The Palace of Dreams and The Three-Arched Bridge. Pablo Neruda, poet of Chile and the world, for showing us what an infinite prism is metaphor. Linda Bierds, blessed poet not of self but of selves, with an uncanny ability to rove history in bell-clear tones.

Book you've always meant to finish reading:  

Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer. This epic of political involvement during the apartheid era in South Africa is intricate at all levels and at its most intense and Dostoevskian, I tend to put the book down like something glowing mysteriously and vow to come back to it when it and I have cooled.

Book you're an evangelist for:  

The All of It by Jeannette Haien. It's a pocket miracle, partly an Irish A River Runs Through It, partly a love story of the most heart-aching sort, and thoroughly stunning in its command of language.

Book you've bought for the cover:  

Wind, Sand and Stars. The Paul Bacon Studio's 1967 paperback artwork for Antoine de Saint Exupery's meditations on flying, a lone small biplane in the center of the cover with a swatch of the Andes emerging above, still seems to be perfect. No way could I have guessed that Paul later would become part of American consciousness with a very different piece of art, that ever-rising shark on the cover of Jaws, and that starting with my first book, This House of Sky, his inimitable inventiveness would grace five of my covers.

Book that changed your life:  

Solitude by Anthony Storr. One of the oddest aspects of being a writer is having to sit around in your own head all the time, watching things flit through the twilight of the mind as you try to figure out--was that a bat that just flew past? Or the whispering ghost of Shakespeare? This Oxford clinical psychologist's validation of creative aloneness, "a valuable integrating process which, like meditation or prayer, has little to do with other people," brought me the relief and understanding that the lonesome work of writing is itself a legitimate companion.

Favorite line from a book:  

So many, so many. I'll stick with the opening line of A Farewell to Arms, perhaps not even Ernest Hemingway's best, but rhythmically sinuous enough that I always use it for a microphone check: "In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain towards the mountains."

Book that makes you sit up and ask, "Where did this come from?"

All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren. Grandee of Yale, prize-winning poet, Southern gentleman of letters, Warren used his witnessing of the Huey Long political regime in Louisiana to go on a spree of prose that anticipates Jack Kerouac, a decade ahead of On the Road. As a novel, King's Men tries to tell too many stories at once--it stops and broods at the drop of a vote, plotwise it's pretty much a mess--but on almost any given page, it makes you pop your eyelids and think, whoa, this is what writing can do?

Book you most want to read again for the first time:  

The Commitments by Roddy Doyle. Maximally raunchy as it is, Doyle's tale of young Dublin layabouts tuning themselves up into a Motown-style band is a tour de force of dialogue. Beyond that, he brings off the terrific aural stunt of getting the sounds of the the Commitments and their female backup singers, the Commitmentettes, onto the page, music by way of the eye to ear. ("The horns:--DUUH—DU DUHH—DUUH DU DUHH—") Rapid magic, Brother Doyle.