Only My Favorite Writers

Noah Cicero's novels are shorter than most I know of, but it takes me longer to finish them. This is because every few lines he will say something that causes me to get up and pace the floor. In his debut novel, The Human War, he has his narrator say "I need books. I need those dead man's lines. I need their truth. I like writers who write out of necessity. Writers who write because they have to. Who are compelled to express. They are driven by one thing only, and that is the written word." These lines could easily be ascribed to Noah himself, who spent his late teens and early twenties digesting literature with an autodidactic fervor and producing novels that were like claustrophobic rooms filled with kinetic energy. Noah Cicero is a deep thinker whose feelings perhaps run even deeper, a rarity in the generally sterile world of contemporary fiction. He has traveled the world from rural Ohio to Las Vegas, from South Korea to the Grand Canyon; along the way picking