Elizabeth Graver asked Aaron Hamburger:

Hi Aaron, Who are some of the writers you count as influences, particularly as you were writing Hotel Cuba?

Aaron Hamburger Thanks for that question. For me, first and foremost is always E. M. Forster. I always aspire to hi deep humanitarianism and elegant sentence-crafting. I also love Bernard Malamud's stories and his novel The Assistant, which was particularly enlightening in terms of how he brought the rhythms of Yiddish to English. Maybe this next one seems like a curveball, but Jane Austen! Sense and Sensibility, with its story of two sisters, one practical and the other romantic, was a kind of analog for this story. Oh, and of course, the marriage plot!

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