This, too:
It wasn’t until after graduation, while he was selling clothing in a rock-music store in Los Angeles, that Bock really discovered fiction, and he began a crash course in contemporary writing, following a trail of blurbs. If someone on the jacket recommended a book Bock liked, then he would immediately read the recommender’s books. Rick Moody’s “Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven” made a huge impression, and so did David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” Those writers lead to William Vollmann and Richard Powers and Jonathan Franzen and in turn to older writers like John Barth, Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver and to some of Bock’s near-contemporaries: Mary Gaitskill, George Saunders, A. M. Homes. “I discovered there was all this good stuff out there,” he said, “and as I began to try to write, it completely changed the way I thought about character and how I was going to address the city I grew up in.”
With Apologies Unlimited 