My Literary Top 10: The longest Literary Top 10 published on Pulp Net,
by Paul Morley |
|  | 1 | Best short story I've ever read Could be one by Poe, The Tell Tale Heart, or by Kafka, In The Penal Colony, or by Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths, or by Balzac, A Passion in the Desert, or by Dostoevsky, The Heavenly Christmas Tree, or by Pynchon, Entropy, or by Woolf, The String Quartet, or by Cheever, The Enormous Radio, and then if the short story is for those with short attention span, Collette's The Other Wife, or Marquez’s One of these Days, or if the short story is all about memory, something by Priestley, Barthelme, Foster Wallace that I can’t remember the name of, or for sheer fun William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic, and for some other reason, Phillip Jose Farmer’s Mother? but I think I’m going to put the following writers in the memory pit of my science fiction teenage days and let Ellison, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Ballard, The Wind From Nowhere, and Philip K Dick, Second Variety, fight it out. Second Variety might win, physically more than metaphysically, if only because it (unofficially) gave us ‘The Terminator’ as much as Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep gave us ‘Bladerunner’.
| | 2 | Books I’m reading on the tube at the moment, and one that I read on the tube
and the tube journey took me all the way to 16th New Zealand and stranded me
there and I want my time and money back except I was reading a free review copy
Coupland, Hey Nostradamus : Delillo, Americana : A to Z of London. The one I
read on the tube and the tube journey etc was The Crimson Petal and the White
by Michel Faber.
| | 3 | Most famous author I’ve met who acted like an idiot Jackie Collins. I interviewed her at The Ritz, and she idiotically refused to let us conduct the interview in the shower. I thought, in the light of her books, that this was appropriate. She did not. Also, she refused to teach me how to write, and got her PR to throw me out of her suite when I asked her
about the nature of the hard-on. I thought that this was also appropriate. She did not.
| | 4 | [Celebrity] author I’d like to see forced to eat nothing but Nuttall’s Mintoes for the rest of his life
Nick Hornby MBE, occasionally joined by Jamie Oliver.
| | 5 | Books to read while listening to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music • The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K Dick
• White Noise by Don DeLillo
• Live From New York – An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales, Andrew Miller
•The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme
• How To Write by Gertrude Stein
• Going Native by Stephen Wright
• Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure In The Clinical Process by Nancy McWilliams
• The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
• The novelisation of Scooby Doo The Movie by Suzanne Weyn
• Classical Music For Dummies
• And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
| | 6 | Most out of date or photoshopped author photo A colour photograph of Leo Tolstoy wearing peasant dress at his country estate in 1908. I am not sure if this is an answer. But the photo is fantastic, and so out of date it is ahead of its time. Also it looks as if it has been photoshopped, but was actually an early experiment in colour photography.
| | 7 | Best ‘film of the book’ I've seen ‘Moby Dick’ based on Moby Dick by Herbert Melville, ‘Adaptation’ based on The Orchid Thief by Susan Orleans, the original ‘Planet of the Apes’ based on Monkey Planet by Pierre Boulle, ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ based on Israel Rank by Roy Horniman, ‘Fahrenheit 451’ based on Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, ‘Double Indemnity’ based on Double Indemnity by James M Cain, ‘Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask’ based on Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask by Doctor David Reubens, ‘Dr Strangelove, or How I Learnt To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb’ based on Red Alert by Peter George, ‘Die Hard’ based on Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp, ‘Crash’ based on Crash by JG Ballard.
| | 8 | Best novelisation of a film ET by William Kotzwinkle, Alien 1 and 2 by Alan Dean Foster, 24 Hour Party People by Anthony H Wilson, Dr Stangelove or How I Learnt To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Peter George (based on the film based on the book by... Peter George)
| | 9 | My favourite bookshop Amazon.com or co.uk — the life, the lists, the links, the mania, the obsessions; Highgate bookshop because it is local, Barnes and Noble Lincoln Square NYNY because it isn’t.
| | 10 | Author I’d like to see presented with all kinds of awards Ballard. Knighted. His books should be knighted too. Arise, Sir Crash.
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