Greg Iles spent his youth in Natchez, Miss., and studied the American novel under acclaimed Southern writer Willie Morris at the University of Mississippi. His new novel, Natchez Burning (Morrow, April 29, 2014), continues the story of Penn Cage, protagonist of The Quiet Game, Turning Angel and The Devil's Punchbowl. Iles's novels have been published in more than 35 countries and made into films. He is a member of the lit-rock group the Rock Bottom Remainders and lives in Natchez with his two teenage children. He's on Twitter @GregIles.
On your nightstand now:
The Jack Taylor novels by Ken Bruen; The Elements of Gnosticism by Stuart Holroyd; the memoirs of David L. Cohn; The Good Lord Bird by James McBride; Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor; The New Mind of the South by Tracy Thompson.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Arty the Smarty by Faith McNulty. My first literary agent, Natasha Kern, told me that our favorite earliest book offers a key to our true identities. Arty the Smarty was perfect for a toddler thriller writer.
Your top five authors:
I'm not listing the classics here. That would be like saying my favorite songwriter is Mozart. Let's say "best works written post-1945" (and asking for only five is just cruel): Robert Penn Warren, Patrick O'Brian, Martin Cruz Smith, Stephen King and William Manchester.
Book you've faked reading:
Half the novels I was assigned to read in college. I read most of those books years later, but--cringe--not at the time. I became a very skilled faker. Probably the most egregious fake, being raised in Faulkner country, was the Bible in its entirety. I've read parts, but certainly not the whole thing. (I also happen to be a huge fan of Moby-Dick, which a lot of authors have confessed to fake-reading.)
Book you're an evangelist for:
A Woman in Berlin, the anonymously published diary of a German female journalist who lived through the mass rapes by the Red Army after the fall of Berlin. One of the most harrowing first-person accounts ever set to paper. The lesson: women truly are stronger than men.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity, with the spike through the seashell. That's one of the most effective jacket graphics ever, for some Jungian reason I'll never understand. Another jacket deserves mention, because it scared the hell out of me as a child: The Magus by John Fowles, with some sort of Anubis-beast on the cover. I saw it as a boy in Mexico City, and I felt like that creature was watching me out of the book.
Book that changed your life:
J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Hobbit never did it for me, but Rings seemed so real that it made me doubt the barrier between reality and dreams. As I got older, I realized that those books represented the triumph of imagination over reality, and yet still communicated something about reality. That seemed a worthy goal to which to aspire, especially for a kid with an active imagination.
Favorite line from a book:
"She knew she wasn't dreaming; in the absolute dark she could hear the tiny clicks her eyes made when she blinked." --Thomas Harris, from The Silence of the Lambs. That level of observation almost amounts to insight.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Lord of the Rings.