In my personal blog I recently posted a writing prompt:

You are having a dinner party for writers and you can invite five writers-
living or dead. Who do you invite and why?

Then I posted my first round of picks.

It will probably surprise no one that I can imagine a second dinner party that would be just as interesting (to me, at least):

Graham Greene

Because of The Power and the Glory, and even later works like Monsigneur Quixote.  And because of one line in The Third Man:  “The graves lay under the trees like wolves.”

Margaret Laurence

Because of the opening line in The Diviners. I like her work so much that I named one of my children after a Margaret Laurence character.

George Eliot

Because I love a big nineteenth century novel that is solid like a Studebaker. Middlemarch is like a parfait, it has layers.

Alice Hoffman

Because her writing exposes the complexity of human emotions like a flensing knife exposes blubber.

Malcolm Lowry

Because Under the Volcano can be read as though it is a tarot card spread. Seriously, it’s a tour through the major arcana in the Rider-Waite deck.

And, just in case someone declined the invite (I’m looking at you, Alice Hoffman; I’ve heard you can be an elitist), I’d invite Tim Powers just because he wrote about an evil djinn that hovers over the city of Moscow and inspires the KGB to even greater acts of terror and wretchedness.