BEST AUTHOR BEST : ESI EDUGYAN [ PART 2 ]

.-  What surprised you most about seeing '' Washington Black '' adapted for television?

I was struck by how much more externalized the storytelling has to be. This would seem an obvious fact, but it can still surprise you.

Because characters' inner worlds can't be assessed as readily, everything must be recreated as surface, as something that can be gleaned visually.

And so the set design is ferociously intricate, and multitudes are expressed in a glance or a grimace or the way a masterful actor carries her body.

In a novel, the writing is everything. In a series or a film, it is one thread of a larger netting.

.-  What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?

I've never been able to finish '' Moby Dick, '' an admission made all the more dreadful for the fact that it is my partner's favorite novel.

.-  WHAT books are on your night stand?

Ben Lerner's exquisite '' 10:04, '' Which I've somehow only just come to : James Fox's '' The World According to Color : A Cultural History ''; Percival Everett's '' James ''; Alan Hollinghurst's '' Our Evenings ''; Katie Kitamura's '' Audition '' ; and Donatella Di Pietrantonio's '' The Brittle Age.''

.-  Tell me about western Canadian writers the wider world should know more about.

Patrick Lane was one of our greatest poets - his work is in many ways evocative of Cormac McCarthy.

Also wonderful are the short stories of Tamas Dobozy and the novels of Patrick deWitt; Michael Christie's era-spanning '' Greenwood ''; Jasmine Sealy's epic '' The Island of Forgetting.''

Steven Price's elegant ''Lampedusa''; the beautiful poetry of Lorna Crozier and Jan Zwicky.

For canonical works, I'd suggest Sheila Watson's high modernist novel '' The Double Hook,'' Jack Hodgins's Vancouver Island stories '' Spit Delaney's Island,'' and Joy Kogawa's ''Ohasan,'' about the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II.

.-  You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

Leo Tolstoy, Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante - though I fear Tolstoy might spend the evening lecturing us on the world's ills.

The World Students Society thanks. The New York Times.