Thomas Chatterton Williams holds a B.A. in philosophy from Georgetown University and an M.A. from the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. In 2007, he wrote an op-ed piece entitled "Black Culture Beyond Hip-Hop" for the Washington Post that generated a huge response. He writes for the literary magazine n+1 and lives in Brooklyn. His first book is Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture (The Penguin Press, May 3, 2010).
On your nightstand now:
In a stack on my nightstand as I write (from top to bottom, in size order): Philosophy in the Boudoir by the Marquis de Sade; two very old and beat-up copies of Jorge Luis Borges's short-lived magazine, Sur, which I picked up at an antiques shop in Buenos Aires; and the Momofuko cookbook by David Chang and Peter Meehan, which I feel would look way too pretentious in the kitchen. 
Favorite book when you were a child:
I think I'm going to have to go with Matilda by Roald Dahl. There was a moment in grade school when this was all the rage and I read it three or four times.
Your top five authors:
Wow, this is hard. I have to cheat a little and ask that you indulge me in a top five for fiction, as well as a separate top five for nonfiction, because the two forms are not always commensurate.
Fiction: Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Bolaño, Ralph Ellison, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy.
Nonfiction: James Baldwin, Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, Jorge Luis Borges, Friedrich Nietzsche.
Book you've faked reading:
There are so many! The one that immediately comes to mind is Proust's In Search of Lost Time. I never made it out of Jeunes Filles en Fleur. But it took Virginia Woolf 11 years to finish the whole thing, so I've still got five years left.
Book you're an evangelist for:
I am a straight-up very annoying Roberto Bolaño proselytizer, particularly for The Savage Detectives, but really for anything he's ever written, even the poetry. The man was incapable of writing uninteresting sentences. If you have never read Bolaño, you need him in your life.
Book you've bought for the cover:
There are many. Design really matters to me. The one I have in front of me right now is the hardcover Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace, published by Knopf. I already had three or four editions of the book, but this one is gorgeous and impossible to pass up.
Book(s) that changed your life:
There was a book and a short story, so I'll give a two-part answer.
As a child, my father used to always give me clipped articles, poems and short stories to read, and then we'd discuss them. (Actually, now that I think about it, he still does this with me as an adult!) Once he gave me a Xeroxed copy of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." The story is a kind of allegory about the dangers of following blind tradition and groupthink. It's powerful. I've read this story many times in my life, but even as a little kid it made a tremendous impression on me.
Without a doubt, the book that most affected me in college was Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. The "Grand Inquisitor" passage alone remains one of the most significant things I've ever encountered.
Favorite line from a book:
"Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot." That's from Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote, and it is so true.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges. This, for me, is reading at its most pleasurable. I have two copies of the book now. Traveling back from Argentina, a bottle of Malbec got crushed in my duffle bag and spilled all over my original copy. I thought this was fitting, but bought another because I reread these stories constantly.
What five authors, dead or alive, would you most like to have a beer with?
Well, they're all dead: Plato, Aristotle, David Foster Wallace, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov.
