Peter Manseau is the author of several books, including the novel Songs for the Butcher's Daughter, winner of the 2008 National Jewish Book Award and the American Library Association's Sophie Brody Medal and published by Free Press earlier this month as a trade paperback. He lives in Washington, D.C., where he teaches writing and studies religion at Georgetown University.

On your nightstand now:

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh and Mystic River by Dennis Lehane. The former I feel I should read, and the latter I can't stop reading.

Favorite book when you were a child:

James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl. If I remember this one correctly, it was not so much the giant peach I liked as the giant bugs who lived inside it. Thinking back on it now, I wish I had put more giant bugs in my book. Even lacking the bugs, though, I must admit there are a few similarities between this somewhat creepy children's book and Songs for the Butcher's Daughter. James's new life with his giant insect friends surely has something to do with the themes of identity and assimilation that play such an important role in my novel . . . or at least Kafka might say so.

Your top five authors:

The first three that jump to mind: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Graham Greene, Bernard Malamud. I loved Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible enough for her to be on the list, and finally I've got to go with Dostoyevsky, if only because the man was relentless. Nothing would stop him from writing, and he did great work even under duress, perhaps because of it. I can still remember a biographical sketch of Dostoyevsky I came across while reading The Brothers Karamazov in college. One paragraph began with something like "Lonely, in despair, still writing." He was the Rasputin of struggling writers.

Book you've faked reading:

I think I've read 10 pages of Dickens. For some reason, he and I keep missing each other.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Underworld by Don Delillo. Not that he needs my help, but it's just such a great book about American lives and the way objects follow us around and what we do with the objects we want to get rid of.

Book that changed your life:

The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton. The autobiography of the world's most famous recluse, it nearly made me a monk myself. (Details on that misadventure can be found in my memoir, Vows.)

Favorite line from a book:

It's a line that appears in two of my favorites. In Philip Roth's Operation Shylock he has a riff on Dostoyevsky's best line: "This changes everything." Context of course is all, and in both books the line comes at a time when what seems an overstatement is a colossal and hilarious understatement. The best lines work by playing with our expectations.

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

The Brothers Karamazov. There's nothing like coming to the close of a book that size, feeling the triumph of a monumental reading experience, and coming upon the last page with its multiple exclamations of "Hurrah!" It's what reaching the end of a book should feel like, for both reader and writer.