Coen brothers reading list

From Flavorwire:

Like film geek predecessors such as Jean-Luc Godard or Quentin Tarantino, Joel and Ethan Coen’s success as filmmakers stems from their love of the form. And yet, the Coen Brothers’ films are also marked by complex allusions and literary references, profound narrative insights that are often plumbed from a different medium entirely. Some movies such as No Country for Old Men, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and their latest True Grit are direct screen adaptations of classic stories, but there’s plenty of between-the-lines literary references in their other work. With this bookish background in mind, here’s a guide to authors whose influence can be seen throughout the Coen Brothers’ oeuvre.

For the record, the list is:

Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night)

Flannery O’Connor (A Good Man is Hard to Find, Wise Blood)

Cormac McCarthy (The Road, No Country for Old Men)

Homer (The Odyssey)

Dashiell Hammett (The Glass Key, Red Harvest)

William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury, The Reivers)

Hey, I’ve read all these writers! Glad to see O’Connor on the list as she’s one of my all-time favorites. Here’s an hour-long roundtable discussion about O’Connor’s work featuring Mary Gauthier, Minton Sparks, Linford Detweiler and Karin Berquist of Over the Rhine, and Julie Lee:

For more on O’Connor, visit The Andalusia Foundation.

For more of the Flavorwire article, go here.

And just for fun, here is Moviefone’s 10 best Coen brothers movie characters.

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