Tuesday, October 15, 2013

James Franco's six favorite books

James Franco is the talented, ubiquitous, popular, and provocative actor, director, author, and visual artist. His first book, the story collection Palo Alto, was published in 2010. His first novel, Actors Anonymous, debuts this month.

One of the author's six favorite books, as told to The Week magazine:
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece recounts the horrific 19th-century adventures of the scalp-hunting Glanton gang in language that reaches for the biblical. This is how Westerns should be done now: No white hat, black hat; no good cowboys and bad Indians. Here, everyone is as evil as pitch.
Read about the other books on the list.

Blood Meridian is one authority's pick for the Great Texas novel; it is among Philipp Meyer's five best books that explain America, Peter Murphy's top ten literary preachers, David Vann's six favorite books, Robert Olmstead's six favorite books, Michael Crummey's top ten literary feuds, Philip Connors's top ten wilderness books, six books that made a difference to Kazuo Ishiguro, Clive Sinclair's top 10 westerns, Maile Meloy's six best books, and David Foster Wallace's five direly underappreciated post-1960 U.S. novels. It appears on the New York Times list of the best American fiction of the last 25 years and among the top ten works of literature according to Stephen King.

Also see: James Franco's 2010 six best books list.

--Marshal Zeringue