Books from Quentin Tarantino

Chaos

A journalist's twenty-year fascination with the Manson murders leads to shocking new revelations about the FBI's involvement in this riveting reassessment of an infamous case in American history.Over two grim nights in Los Angeles, the young followers of Charles Manson murdered seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate, then eight months pregnant. With no mercy and seemingly no motive, the Manson Family followed their leader's every order -- their crimes lit a flame of paranoia across the nation, spelling the end of the sixties. Manson became one of history's most infamous criminals, his name forever attached to an era when charlatans mixed with prodigies, free love was as possible as brainwashing, and utopia -- or dystopia -- was just an acid trip away.Twenty years ago, when journalist Tom O'Neill was reporting a magazine piece about the murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Then he unearthed shocking evidence of a cover-up behind the "official" story, including police carelessness, legal misconduct, and potential surveillance by intelligence agents. When a tense interview with Vincent Bugliosi -- prosecutor of the Manson Family and author of Helter Skelter -- turned a friendly source into a nemesis, O'Neill knew he was onto something. But every discovery brought more questions:Who were Manson's real friends in Hollywood, and how far would they go to hide their ties?Why didn't law enforcement, including Manson's own parole officer, act on their many chances to stop him?And how did Manson -- an illiterate ex-con -- turn a group of peaceful hippies into remorseless killers?O'Neill's quest for the truth led him from reclusive celebrities to seasoned spies, from San Francisco's summer of love to the shadowy sites of the CIA's mind-control experiments, on a trail rife with shady cover-ups and suspicious coincidences. The product of two decades of reporting, hundreds of new interviews, and dozens of never-before-seen documents from the LAPD, the FBI, and the CIA, Chaos mounts an argument that could be, according to Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Steven Kay, strong enough to overturn the verdicts on the Manson murders. This is a book that overturns our understanding of a pivotal time in American history.
Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
"Fantastic." - Quentin Tarantino
Books from Quentin Tarantino

The Omen

One night in Rome, Robert Thorn, American diplomat, exchanges his still-born son for a newborn orphan.
Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
"It's really good." - Quentin Tarantino
Books from Quentin Tarantino

Orca

Orca--the killer whale--is one of the most intelligent creatures in the universe. He hunts in packs, like a wolf. Incredibly, he is the only animal other than man who kills for revenge. He has one mate, and if she is harmed by man, he will hunt down that person with a relentless, terrible vengeance--across seas, across time, across all obstacles.
Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
"A fantastic novelization!" - Quentin Tarantino
Books from Quentin Tarantino

Bruce Lee



Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
"The first biography I ever read." - Quentin Tarantino
Books from Quentin Tarantino

9/30/55



Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
Quentin Tarantino recommended this book on "The Big Picture" podcast.
Books from Quentin Tarantino

Endless Highway

Endless Highway provides a raucous ride down the road that has been David Carradine's life. The son of a world-renowned Shakespearean actor, Carradine's early years were spent being shuttled from mother to estranged father to relative to boarding school to reformatory. Spontaneity, quick-wittedness, and ingenuousness were his guideposts in life, and he quickly learned that creativity was survival. The fifties found him in San Francisco among the original members that spawned the Beat Generation, and his path through the drug-flooded sixties and seventies ultimately led him to "Kung Fu", the show that helped launch an Eastern spiritual philosophy into Western culture. Writing with warmth, humor, and tremendous insight, Carradine provides an honest and in-depth look at his life. Had Holden Caulfield grown up, met Hunter S. Thompson, gone on the road with Jack Kerouac, and finally studied with Master Po - well, perhaps that would embrace the spirit of Carradine's own writing style. He has been, in his own words, fraud, genius, holy man, movie star, martyr, monster, fool, hero, whore, neurotic, poet, burnout, beauty, beast - but always a legend.
Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
"One of the best actor biographies I ever read." - Quentin Tarantino
Books from Quentin Tarantino

Little Boy Blue

Young Alex Hamilton is intelligent and independent but given to sudden fits of violent rage. Rebellious since his parents split up, Alex is constantly absconding from foster homes and institutions to be with his father, a broken man who can't give his son the home he desperately needs. Surrounded by well-meaning, over-worked social workers, vicious and cruel authority figures but always by no good peers, Alex is on a collision course with the law and himself.
Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
"The best first-person crime novel I've ever read." - Quentin Tarantino
Books from Quentin Tarantino

Pictures at a Revolution

The epic human drama behind the making of the five movies nominated for Best Picture in 1967-Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Doctor Doolittle, and Bonnie and Clyde-and through them, the larger story of the cultural revolution that transformed Hollywood, and America, forever It's the mid-1960s, and westerns, war movies and blockbuster musicals-Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music-dominate the box office. The Hollywood studio system, with its cartels of talent and its production code, is hanging strong, or so it would seem. Meanwhile, Warren Beatty wonders why his career isn't blooming after the success of his debut in Splendor in the Grass; Mike Nichols wonders if he still has a career after breaking up with Elaine May; and even though Sidney Poitier has just made history by becoming the first black Best Actor winner, he's still feeling completely cut off from opportunities other than the same "noble black man" role. And a young actor named Dustin Hoffman struggles to find any work at all. By the Oscar ceremonies of the spring of 1968, when In the Heat of the Night wins the 1967 Academy Award for Best Picture, a cultural revolution has hit Hollywood with the force of a tsunami. The unprecedented violence and nihilism of fellow nominee Bonnie and Clyde has shocked old-guard reviewers but helped catapult Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway into counterculture stardom and made the movie one of the year's biggest box-office successes. Just as unprecedented has been the run of nominee The Graduate, which launched first-time director Mike Nichols into a long and brilliant career in filmmaking, to say nothing of what it did for Dustin Hoffman, Simon and Garfunkel, and a generation of young people who knew that whatever their future was, it wasn't in plastics. Sidney Poitier has reprised the noble-black-man role, brilliantly, not once but twice, in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night, movies that showed in different ways both how far America had come on the subject of race in 1967 and how far it still had to go. What City of Nets did for Hollywood in the 1940s and Easy Riders, Raging Bulls for the 1970s, Pictures at a Revolution does for Hollywood and the cultural revolution of the 1960s. As we follow the progress of these five movies, we see an entire industry change and struggle and collapse and grow-we see careers made and ruined, studios born and destroyed, and the landscape of possibility altered beyond all recognition. We see some outsized personalities staking the bets of their lives on a few films that became iconic works that defined the generation-and other outsized personalities making equally large wagers that didn't pan out at all. The product of extraordinary and unprecedented access to the principals of all five films, married to twenty years' worth of insight covering the film industry and a bewitching storyteller's gift, Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution is a bravura accomplishment, and a work that feels iconic itself.
Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
"Probably one of the best books I’ve ever read in my life." - Quentin Tarantino
Books from Quentin Tarantino

Harold and Maude

Den dødsfikserede unge mand Harolds største fornøjelse er at gå til begravelser. Her møder han den 80-årige Maude med samme interesse, og et både sært og tæt venskab udvikler sig
Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
"I didn't see Harold and Maude until about seven years ago, but I read [this book] in the 70's." - Quentin Tarantino
Books from Quentin Tarantino

Men, Women, and Chain Saws

From its first publication in 1992, Men, Women, and Chain Saws has offered a groundbreaking perspective on the creativity and influence of horror cinema since the mid-1970s. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, Carol Clover looks in particular at slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. Although such movies have been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasures to their mostly male audiences, Clover demonstrates that they align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the females tormented—notably the slasher movie's "final girls"—as they endure fear and degradation before rising to save themselves. The lesson was not lost on the mainstream industry, which was soon turning out the formula in well-made thrillers.Including a new preface by the author, this Princeton Classics edition is a definitive work that has found an avid readership from students of film theory to major Hollywood filmmakers.
Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film: 1992 book by film theorist Carol Clover, which Tarantino claimed in a 2008 interview with Sight & Sound served as “one of the biggest inspirations” for Death Proof.
Books from Quentin Tarantino

The Switch: A Novel

Dangerously eccentric characters, razor-sharp black humor, brilliant dialog, and suspense all rolled into one tight package—that’s The Switch, Elmore Leonard’s classic tale of a kidnapping gone wrong…or terribly right, depending on how you look at it. The Grand Master whom the New York Times Book Review calls, “the greatest crime writer of our time, perhaps ever,” has written a wry and twisting tale that any of the other all-time greats—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, John D. MacDonald, James M. Cain, Robert Parker…every noir author who ever walked a detective, cop, or criminal into a shadowy alley—would be thrilled to call their own. Leonard, the man who has given us U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (currently starring in TV’s Justified) is at his storytelling best, as a spurned wife decides to take a rightful—and profitable—revenge on her deceiving hubby by teaming up with the two thugs he hired to abduct her.
Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
The Switch: 1978 Elmore Leonard book featuring characters from Jackie Brown, as well as the first Leonard book that Tarantino had ever read.
Books from Quentin Tarantino

From Shane to Kill Bill

From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western is an original and compelling critical history of the American Western film. Provides an insightful overview of the American Western genre Covers the entire history of the Western, from 1939 to the present Analyses Westerns as products of a genre, as well as expressions of political and social desires Deepens an audience’s understanding of the genre’s most important works, including Shane, Stagecoach, The Searchers, Unforgiven, and Kill Bill Contains numerous illustrations of the films and issues discussed.
Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
I really got a big kick out of that western one that's come out, what was that, Westerns from Shane to Kill Bill.
Books from Quentin Tarantino

Rum Punch

From America's top writer of hardboiled crime, the novel that became Tarantino's hit film JACKIE BROWN.Ordell Robbie makes a fine living selling illegal high-powered weaponry to the wrong people. Jackie Burke couriers Ordell's profits from Freeport to Miami. But the feds are on to Jackie - and now the aging, but still hot, flight attendant will have to do prison time or play ball, which makes her a prime 'loose end' that Ordell needs to tie up...permanently. Jackie, however, has other plans. And with the help of Max Cherry - an honest but disgruntled bail bondsman looking to get out - she could even end up with a serious nest egg in the process.
Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
Elmore Leonard was a real mentor to me as far as writing is concerned. He helped me find my voice,” said Tarantino.
Books from Quentin Tarantino

Elmore Leonard: the Classic Crime Novels

The Library of America presents the definitive edition of an American master of crime fiction- twelve modern classics in a deluxethree-volume collector's boxed set. This is Elmore Leonard at his unbeatable best. Contains- Four Novels of the 1970s(Library of America volume #255) Fifty-Two Pickup Swag Unknown Man No. 89 The Switch Four Novels of the 1980s(Library of America volume#267) City Primeval LaBrava Glitz Freaky Deaky Four Later Novels(Library of America volume#280) Get Shorty Rum Punch Out of Sight Tishomingo Blues LIBRARY OF AMERICAis an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
“Leonard opened my eyes to the dramatic possibilities of everyday speech,” said Tarantino.
Books from Quentin Tarantino

When the lights go down

Brings together all of Kael's writings for The New Yorker over the past four years, including her famous profile of Cary Grant and her reviews of some two hundred films of the late 1970s
Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
Tarantino read New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael’s 1980 book at 16 and, according to a 1992 interview with Positif, “[I] thought, ‘Someday maybe I’ll be able to understand a movie like she does.’”
Books from Quentin Tarantino

All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

A young writer hits the dusty Texas highway for the California coast in this “brilliant . . . funny and dangerously tender” (Time) tale of art and sacrifice. Hailed as one of “the best novels ever set in America’s fourth largest city” (Douglas Brinkley, New York Times Book Review), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is a powerful demonstration of Larry McMurtry’s “comic genius, his ability to render a sense of landscape, and interior intellection tension” (Jim Harrison, New York Times Book Review). Desperate to break from the “mundane happiness” of Houston, budding writer Danny Deck hops in his car, “El Chevy,” bound for the West Coast on a road trip filled with broken hearts and bleak realities of the artistic life. A cast of unforgettable characters joins the naive troubadour’s pilgrimage to California and back to Texas, including a cruel, long-legged beauty; an appealing screenwriter; a randy college professor; and a genuine if painfully “normal” friend. Since the novel’s publication in 1972, Danny Deck has “been far more successful at getting loved by readers than he ever was at getting loved by the women in his life” (McMurtry), a testament to the author’s incomparable talent for capturing the essential tragicomedy of the human experience.
Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
n a 2004 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Tarantino referred to this 1972 Larry McMurtry book as “one of my favorite books of all time.”
Books from Quentin Tarantino

Danse Macabre

From the author of dozens of #1 New York Times bestsellers and the creator of many unforgettable movies comes a vivid, intelligent, and nostalgic journey through three decades of horror as experienced through the eyes of the most popular writer in the genre. In 1981, years before he sat down to tackle On Writing, Stephen King decided to address the topic of what makes horror horrifying and what makes terror terrifying. Here, in ten brilliantly written chapters, King delivers one colorful observation after another about the great stories, books, and films that comprise the horror genre—from Frankenstein and Dracula to The Exorcist, The Twilight Zone, and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers.With the insight and good humor his fans appreciated in On ?Writing , Danse Macabre is an enjoyably entertaining tour through Stephen King’s beloved world of horror.
Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
Stephen King talks about that in his book Danse Macabre, about how you have to drink a lot of milk before you can appreciate the cream and how you have to drink a lot of milk that has gone bad before you can appreciate milk.
Books from Quentin Tarantino

Hoke Moseley Omnibus

Hoke Moseley is the star of the modern South Florida crime novel, birthed by Charles Willeford, whose forebear is John D. MacDonald and who, in his turn, has inspired Carl Hiaasen and Quentin Tarantino. Through Moseley we are witness to a Miami in transition, from lush retirement haven to capital of 1980s glamour, drugs and weird crime. Willeford's four Miami novels present a hero rather the worse for wear. Hoke sucks at life; in his mid-forties, with false teeth and an aching body, a bad divorce has left him with the cheap work and the care of two teenage daughters. His offbeat humour, brilliant writing and quirky sense of fashion have assured Charles Willeford a permanent place alongside the greats of modern crime fiction.
Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
It's not noir. I don't do neo-noir. I see Pulp Fiction as closer to modern-day crime fiction, a little closer to Charles Willeford, though I don't know if that describes it either. What's similar is that Willeford is doing his own thing with his own characters, creating a whole environment and a whole family. The thing that is so great is that those fucking characters become so real to you that when you read each new book and you find out what's going on with his daughters and his old partner, they're almost like members of your own family.
Books from Quentin Tarantino

Nine Stories

The "original, first-rate, serious, and beautiful" short fiction (New York Times Book Review) that introduced J. D. Salinger to American readers in the years after World War II, including "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and the first appearance of Salinger's fictional Glass family.Nine exceptional stories from one of the great literary voices of the twentieth century. Witty, urbane, and frequently affecting, Nine Stories sits alongside Salinger's very best work--a treasure that will passed down for many generations to come. The stories:A Perfect Day for BananafishUncle Wiggily in ConnecticutJust Before the War with the EskimosThe Laughing ManDown at the DinghyFor Esmé--with Love and SqualorPretty Mouth and Green My EyesDe Daumier-Smith's Blue PeriodTeddy
Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
While Tarantino cites inspiration from crime novels and crime films, he has also been inspired by authors like J.D. Salinger. In a 1994 interview with David Wild, Tarantino spoke on how J. D. Salinger influenced the anthology format of Pulp Fiction, “When you read his Glass family stories, they all add up to one big story. That was the biggest example for me.”
Books from Quentin Tarantino

Leni Riefenstahl

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year.One of the century's most remarkable and controversial women, Leni Riefenstahl is an artist of the first order. Dancer, actor, and photographer, she is best known as the director of Triumph of the Will, a film of a Nazi Party rally and Olympia, the classic account of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It is for these works of cinematic propaganda that Riefenstahl is revered and reviled. In this autobiography, she discusses her motivations, her history, her important friendships, and, most of all, her art. Along with insights into directing and camera work, Riefenstahl offers an emotional, powerful story of a woman who refuses to be defined by any terms other than her own.
Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
Mesmerizing. Though you can’t believe half of it. That still leaves half to ponder. Her descriptions of normal friendly conversations with Hitler are amazing and ring of truth.
Books from Quentin Tarantino

Leni Riefenstahl



Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
The first of many books I’ve read on Fräuline Riefenstahl.
Books from Quentin Tarantino

The Ministry of Illusion

German cinema of the Third Reich, even a half-century after Hitler's demise, still provokes extreme reactions. "Never before and in no other country," observes director Wim Wenders, "have images and language been abused so unscrupulously as here, never before and nowhere else have they been debased so deeply as vehicles to transmit lies." More than a thousand German feature films that premiered during the reign of National Socialism survive as mementoes of what many regard as film history's darkest hour. As Eric Rentschler argues, however, cinema in the Third Reich emanated from a Ministry of Illusion and not from a Ministry of Fear. Party vehicles such as Hitler Youth Quex and anti-Semitic hate films such as Jew Süss may warrant the epithet "Nazi propaganda," but they amount to a mere fraction of the productions from this era. The vast majority of the epoch's films seemed to be "unpolitical"--melodramas, biopix, and frothy entertainments set in cozy urbane surroundings, places where one rarely sees a swastika or hears a "Sieg Heil." Minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels, Rentschler shows, endeavored to maximize film's seductive potential, to cloak party priorities in alluring cinematic shapes. Hitler and Goebbels were master showmen enamored of their media images, the Third Reich was a grand production, the Second World War a continuing movie of the week. The Nazis were movie mad, and the Third Reich was movie made. Rentschler's analysis of the sophisticated media culture of this period demonstrates in an unprecedented way the potent and destructive powers of fascination and fantasy. Nazi feature films--both as entities that unreeled in moviehouses during the regime and as productions that continue to enjoy wide attention today--show that entertainment is often much more than innocent pleasure.
Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
A wonderful critical reexamination of German cinema under Joseph Goebbels. Rentschler goes far beyond the demonizing approach employed by most writers on this subject (like Susan Tegel in Nazis and the Cinema). His excerpts from Goebbels’s diaries are priceless. And after all these years he dares to make a fair appraisal of Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan.
Books from Quentin Tarantino

Occupation: The Ordeal of France

France was slow and somewhat ineffectual in organizing resistance movement. In Occupation Ian Ousby challenges the myth that France was liberated " by the whole of France." The author explores the Nazi occupation of France with superb detail and eyewitness accounts that range from famous figures like Simone de Beauvoir, Charles de Gaulle, Andre Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre and Gertrude Stein to ordinary citizens, forgotten heroes and traitors.
Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
A very good overview that answered all of my questions about life in Nazi-occupied France.
Books from Quentin Tarantino

The Employment of Negro Troops



Quentin Tarantino
Director, Screenwriter
The most profound thing I’ve ever read on both the war and racist America of the 1940s, commissioned by the U.S. Army to examine the effectiveness of their employment of black soldiers. Lee came up with such damning information about the military that it was withheld from public view until 1966. Powerful.”