There may be no more divisive a Pulitzer Prize-winning play than Annie Baker’s “The Flick.”

When it premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 2013, the largely action-less, pause-filled, 3-hour-plus tale set in a rundown movie house whose workers chatted while mopping up had some theatergoers heading for the exits at intermission. But many others saw it as the tender drama critic Jesse Green praised as “funny, heartbreaking, sly and unblinking.”

Now playing at the Barrow Street Theatre, its sublime, original cast intact, “The Flick” started with an image, says its Boston-born, 34-year-old playwright, who says she liked the idea of “a movie theater audience facing a theater audience — the two mediums facing off.”

Here’s what’s in her library:

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

This is my favorite novel and I own two copies of the John E. Woods translation. The beginning of the novel has one of my favorite quotes of all time: “Only thoroughness can be truly entertaining.” This book also made me excited about playing with time. The first chapter covers an hour, the second chapter covers around a day, and as you keep going time keeps speeding up at this alarming rate and by the end of the book years are flying by. Mann also spends a whole chapter just going over what it’s like to read a textbook. He’s willing to zoom in to the point of explaining what a thermometer looks like for 10 pages, but then willing to zoom out and cover World War I in the course of a paragraph. It’s nothing like any other book I’ve ever read.

The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

This book is a series of lectures by William James that he delivered in 1901-2. It’s a totally respectful also totally psychological exploration of the way humans experience the divine. It’s influenced my plays more than any other book (except maybe The Magic Mountain!). James just skips over all the absurd “Is there a God or isn’t there??” debates — there’s no attempt to legitimize or delegitimize religious belie f– and he just delves into conversion narratives and saintliness and mysticism and how we think/feel/experience what he calls “the reality of the unseen.” It’s a pretty extraordinary book with such good research in it and I return to it over and over again.

I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

I just finished this book this week and it blew up all my idea about what a novel or a memoir is/can be and what it means to write in the first person. The book follows Kraus’s obsession with a man named Dick and consists mostly of her letters to him. At one point Kraus say,s “I’ve set myself the job of solving heterosexuality (i.e. finishing this writing project) before turning 40.” And it really does feel like an attempt to figure out and describe the bonkers algebraic equation of being a heterosexual woman.

The Secret Life of Puppets by Victoria Nelson

I read this book a couple of years ago and it partly inspired my new play, “John”. It’s a very deep and personal book of scholarship about the history of the supernatural and occult in the West. She focuses in particular on the power of puppets and other inanimate objects to embody the sacred. This book introduced to me to some of the other authors who had a major influence on my new play–Bruno Schulz, Daniel Schreber and ETA Hoffmann.