Frederic Petrovsky's first novel, Frank, was published by AOL Time Warner in 2001, and won the imprint's inaugural Readers' Choice award. His other novels include The Immigrant, Don’t be Cruel, The Clinton Diaries, and Escape from Yesterday. He has also written a book of poetry, If Only for Love. His work has appeared in Midstream, Arrive, and The Ritz-Carlton Magazine. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona.

Petrovsky is a native of Memphis, Tennessee, and currently lives in Arizona.

"My favorite author is  Gabriel Garcia Marquez," says Petrovsky, "and my favorite book is his One Hundred Years of Solitude. I could read it every day if there weren't so many other good stories to read.  And my favorite quote? His, too: 'On a good day, working from nine o'clock in the morning to two or three in the afternoon, the most I can write is a short paragraph of four or five lines, which I usually tear up the next day.'"

Here are other books he can't live without.

• Falconer, John Cheever
• Dune, Frank Herbert
• Memoirs of an Invisible Man, H.F. Saint
• Middle Passage, Charles Johnson
• The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth
• Time and Again, Jack Finney
• The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
• Cathedral, Raymond Carver
• Ask the Dust, John Fante
• The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
• The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
• The Mysterious Island, Jules Verne
• Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
• Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
• The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
• Catch 22, Joseph Heller
• The Adventures  of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
• Endless Love, Scott Spencer
• Going After Cacciato, Tim O'Brien
• The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
• Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
• The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
• Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Martin Dressler, Steven Milhauser
• Misery, Stephen King
• The Story of Ferdinand, Munro Leaf
• The Story of Dr. Dolittle, Hugh Lofting
• Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak