by Charlotte Strick Part of my job as Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s Paperback Art Director is the repackaging of books from our illustrious backlist. Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond resulted in one of my favorite recent redesigns. To start, we typically mine our company’s massive library archive to see how the title was packaged over the decades. Sometimes there’s a hidden gem sitting on the shelves that’s been waiting to be rediscovered. In 1954, when our company was known as Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, the first edition hardcover of Macaulay’s novel boasted a jacket illustration and design by the venerable Milton Glaser, who is responsible for several of my favorite mid-century FSG jackets, but this one wasn’t as bold or as graphic as those others. The trusty internet turned up a more abstract solution by one of my design heroes, Alvin Lustig. Published in paperback by Meridian Fiction in 1960, it sold for a mere $1.35. Over the years, there had also been different photographic cover treatments by other publishing houses that took less artful approaches, trying perhaps to appeal to more contemporary audiences.

Authors on the Books that Helped Them Come Out Reading may be a solitary experience, but for some of us, it let us know that we were not alone. While everyone’s story is different, many of us are united by our love of books and our belief that they have the power to bring us together and to show us that when we’re different, as Nicola Griffith writes, “we can be glad to be so.” Growing up gay can feel like an excruciatingly isolating experience, particularly without the resources to understand what it is exactly that makes you so different. Books gave us not only a sense of who we were, but who we could be. So whether you hid a copy of A Boy’s Own Story under the bed or kept Fingersmith in your sock drawer, between the covers we were able to find a world for ourselves within the world.

Joshua Dubler is the author of Down in the Chapel: Religious Life in an American Prison, which follows a group of prisoners serving life sentences at Graterford Prison. FSG published Down in the Chapel earlier this month. The acquittal of George Zimmerman last month elicited little surprise at Pennsylvania’s Graterford prison. My friend Charles Coley, who is black and is serving life, characterized the collective sigh in a letter: “There was not much consternation here because people here did not expect any outcome other than what happened. People understand the times, and how so little has changed.”

My candy story begins with an oft-told tale I call “The Jelly Bean Incident.” I relate the story at length at the beginning of Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure, so I’ll just give you the punch line here: when I offered a few jelly beans to a little pre-school friend, his parents flipped out. I mean, you-might-as-well-give-him-crack flipped out. It was a tense moment. What I don’t talk about in the book is what happened next.

Patrick Bateman (American Psycho) If you thought Gordon Gekko was the undisputed champion of corporate psychopathy, then think again because Bateman makes Gekko look like the angst-ridden, self-harming treasurer of a Mormon prayer group. Impeccably well versed in business couture, Bateman’s Achilles' heel is his penchant for prostitutes and chainsaws -- and for his “unchivalrous” amalgamation of the two. (That and his predilection for Huey Lewis.)

Frankenstein's monster is so passé. Especially when you consider all the strange new creatures that scientists have breathed into being in the two centuries since Mary Shelley’s “wretched devil” took its first lumbering steps. This Halloween, retire your Frankenstein costume and dress up as one of these brave new beasts instead.

Baz Luhrmann’s screen adaptation of The Great Gatsby turned out to be an anathema to most devotees of the 1925 novel, a hyperactive, candy-coloured spectacle that violated the delicate texture of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prose. Yet whatever quarrels I personally had with the movie’s style, I found myself hooked by Luhrmann’s attempt to re-invent the period’s Jazz Age energy through a hip hop-driven score.

The early drafts of Marshlands read like a classical tragedy: Gus, a well-intentioned military doctor, is deployed to a war zone where his allegiance to his own empire is tested by a deep affinity for the tribal people he finds there. Torn between the conflicting demands of duty and conscience, he makes a choice that proves to be his undoing. Sophocles’ Antigone was one of my early touchstones. I admired the devastating symmetry at the play’s core: the way a body left unburied on the dusty Theban plain was counterbalanced with Antigone’s live burial. I studied the technique with an eye toward stealing it for my novel.

Carl Van Vechten was a polymath unparalleled in the history of American arts. Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1880, he was, at various times, the nation’s most incisive and far-seeing arts critic who promoted names as diverse as Gertrude Stein and Bessie Smith long before it was popular to do so; a notorious socialite who held legendary parties; a de facto publicist for great forgotten names including Herman Melville; a best-selling author of scandalous novels; and one of the most important champions of African-American literature, vital in advancing the careers of Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Chester Himes.