Tom
Franklin is the author of Poachers:
Stories and the novels Hell at the Breech and
Smonk. In October 2010, Morrow published his new novel, Crooked Letter,
Crooked Letter. Winner of a 2001
Guggenheim Fellowship, Franklin teaches in the University of Mississippi's MFA
program and lives in Oxford, Miss., with his wife, the poet Beth Ann Fennelly,
and their children.
On your nightstand now:
The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall, knee brace, hot sports cream, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, galley of Dennis Lehane's new novel, Moonlight Mile.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Tarzan of the Apes.
Your top five authors:
Beth Ann Fennelly, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, William Gay, Barry Hannah.
Book you've faked reading:
Every John Barth I ever "read" except The Floating Opera, which was good.
Book you're an evangelist for:
All of William Gay and True Grit by Charles Portis. Oh, and Jack Pendarvis's books.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Tarzan of the Apes. Paperback. Neal Adams cover. I was 12 or so and Jane was busty.
Book that changed your life:
Rick Bass's The Watch. That book is filled with unforgettable, booming voices that still boom in my imagination 20 years later. Bass showed me that writing is a way of looking at life. He'd be describing a field in Mississippi and make it so magical I wanted to go there. Then I'd realize I was in a field in Alabama, and they're almost the same. It was how Bass looked at things that made me look at them again.
Favorite line from a book:
I've always loved this description of John Grady Cole in Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses: "All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise." Or this from Tom McGuane in The Bushwhacked Piano: "They'd known each other for the better part of quite some time." Or this from Dr. Seuss: "All the Whos down in Whoville liked Christmas a lot. But the Grinch, who lived north of Whoville, did not."
Best story title:
"Was," William Faulkner.
Favorite song lyric:
"Bomba of the Jungle was everyone's bwana/ but only jazz musicians were smoking marijuana"--Jimmy Buffet, "Pencil Thin Mustache"
Book you've read that almost nobody else has:
Alnilam by James Dickey.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
True Grit.