Daniel
Woodrell's five most recent novels were New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and Tomato Red won the PEN West Award for the Novel. Two of his novels have been
adapted as major motion pictures: Woe to Live On (released in 1999 as Ride with the Devil, directed by Ang Lee and starring Tobey Maguire and Skeet Ulrich) and Winter's
Bone (2010). His short story "Uncle"
(in Busted Flush Press's A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir) was nominated for an Edgar Award. Tomato
Red has just been reprinted by Busted
Flush Press (September 2010). Woodrell lives in the Missouri Ozarks near the Arkansas
line.
On your nightstand now:
Miracle Boy by Pinckney Benedict, Love Begins In Winter by Simon Van Booy, a short stack of Shirley Ann Grau, a taller stack of Ken Bruen and Soul by Andrey Platonov.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.
Your top five authors:
Might be easier to say my top five are the Russians, the French, Americans from the South, from elsewhere, and the Irish.
Book you've faked reading:
Owner's manual to my Ford.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Currently evangelical about the stories of Ivan Bunin and Royo County by Robert Roper.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Certain Things Last by Sherwood Anderson, with the great Charles Burchfield cover art.
Book that changed your life:
Irving Stone's biography of Jack London (Sailor on Horseback) and Leon Uris's Battle Cry, read at the same time at 16, and I promptly quit high school to join the Marines and get in on all the instructive adventure apparently going on out in the world.
Favorite line from a book:
"My mother is a fish."--As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.