1. First Love and Other Shorts by Samuel Beckett
2. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

1. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
2. The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War by Ernest Hemingway

1. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

Co-Creator Thaddeus Phillips recommends:

1. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa
   "This is a crazy novel about a young soap opera writer in Lima, Peru who secretly marries his older aunt and also goes crazy. It gives a great flavor of the creative energy put into creating ¡EL CONQUISTADOR!"
2. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
   "This was used as a source text for the creation of the structure of ¡EL CONQUISTADOR! Polonio, the name of the doorman, comes from Polonius, because there is a scene when he hides behind a curtain, and there is a mirroring of the scene in Hamlet when Claudius confesses (Tati's famous uncle, Victor, as the antagonist Didier, confesses to all the people he has had killed in the exact same manner) AND Polonio sets up the trap to get him to confess with Hamlet's line: 'The plays the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King!' BUT, Polonio, our protagonist, turns out to be smarter than Hamlet."
3. Lonely Planet's Colombia
   "Travel is very important in our work, and this show was created from my personal observations in exploring around Bogota and in Colombia. People should start to think about going there-it is truly an amazing country that is still an undiscovered secret."

Director Whit MacLaughlin recommends:

1. Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
   "A wonderful account of the relationships and rivalries in Abraham Lincoln's cabinet, including great information about their family lives, religious views, political struggles, and the Civil War from the White House perspective. We looked particularly at Lincoln's relationship with his Secretary of State and the different influences of Mary Todd Lincoln and Franny Seward in the White House."
2. The Book of the Mother by The Shivalila
   "A cult classic composed by an actual cult; the first sentence says is all: "This book is about the psychedelic experience and about babies." We also looked closely at Jonestown, the Weaver Family at Ruby Ridge, the Weather Underground, the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, and the Oneida Community."
3. Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin
   "An incendiary, ecstatic tour of duty in the trenches of gender warfare as it is waged throughout Western language and literature. This book is a limit-experience for any feminist."
4. The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing
   "Lessing's sense of inevitability is devastating in this psychologically acute rendering of terrorism as amateurish political action and misplaced anger."

Curator Julie Courtney recommends:

1. Get Capone: The Secret Plot that Captured America's Most Wanted Gangster by Jonathan Eig

Choreographer Brian Sanders recommends:

1. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
   "I was as (if not more) inspired by his postscript then I was by the book for Sanctuary. I am glad I waited until recently to read it and not in college when I was supposed to. I wouldn't have been nearly as ready to play."

Choreographer Nichole Canuso recommends:

1. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
   "The creative team of TAKES drew inspiration from the passionate and meticulous writings of Jorge Luis Borges, primarily "The Garden of Forking Paths", "Circular Ruins" and "The Library of Babel". These stories describe an elliptical relationship between the mundane and the magical that speaks to us as creators."

Choreographer Eun Jung Choi recommends:

1. Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes
   "Thinking of the way my own memory storage is organized (very scattered in parts), I remembered Roland Barthes' notion of punctum. Our memory often creates a falseness in the illusion of 'what is', where 'what was' would be a more accurate description"

Choreographer Shavon Norris recommends:

1. Blood Child by Octavia Butler
   "She writes about crazy far off worlds... and there were brown people there, Asian people, white people, and women, and that was something I liked. I've been a sci-fi fan since I was little. My mom and I watched Twilight Zone together all the time."
2. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
   "It involves the invisible being made visible... being aware of things that you want. I'm not interested in being a passive participant in the world."

Choreographer Jumatatu Poe recommends:

1. Immortality by Milan Kundera
   "Kundera's idea of one's post-mortem legacy being beyond their control is very fascinating to me. I wondered what this legacy would look like when the prospect of death is erased."

Choreographer Jaamil Olawale Kosoko recommends:

1. Animal in Cyberspace Poems by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko
2. Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown
   "I've just started reading Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown. I'm finding so many parallels to my own life. Such a beautiful piece of literature."

1. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel by Haruki Murakami
2. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

1. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement by Andre Lepecki

1. Terpsichore in Sneakers by Sally Banes
2. Sol LeWitt: Incomplete Open Cubes edited by Nicholas Baume
3. Music by Philip Glass by Philip Glass
4. Glass- A Portrait by Robert Maycock

1. Tales from Beijing Opera by Huang Shang
2. Mei Lanfang: The Art of Beijing Opera by Wang Wenzhang