Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Paulette Jiles's 12 favorite books

In a spring 2007 interview with Barnes & Noble, Paulette Jiles named her twelve favorite books:
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

Pawn in Frankincense by Dorothy Dunnett

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature by Northrop Frye

Grimms' Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

Peru by Gordon Lish

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Call It Sleep by Henry Roth

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

The above are my favorites because they are so beautifully written, because of the intelligence that shines from the stories, because of the urgency behind their presentation, and because of the authors' conviction that the story being told matters deeply. Grimms' Fairy Tales, of course, are not by any one author. They are like an open window into an ancient and probably ageless part of our minds that lusts for stories.
Read the complete interview.

Stormy Weather is Paulette Jiles's second novel. Her first novel, Enemy Women, was published in 2002. A national bestseller, it was hailed as "a delight from start to finish" by author Tracy Chevalier, and praised as a "book with backbone, written with a tough, haunting eloquence" by Janet Maslin in the New York Times.

--Marshal Zeringue