Reading List

Authors Like Quentin Tarantino

Q: Does Quentin Tarantino have a new book?

Yes. The Adventures of Cliff Booth, a sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood set in 1977, is published by Harper on 8 December 2026, and by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK. It is his own version of The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, the film he wrote and David Fincher directed with Brad Pitt.

Q: Which Quentin Tarantino book should I read first?

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2021) if you want fiction, or Cinema Speculation (2022) if you want his essays on the films of the 1970s.

Q: What should I read after Cinema Speculation?

Pauline Kael’s I Lost It at the Movies (1965), François Truffaut’s Hitchcock/Truffaut (1966) and Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998).

Q: Which Tarantino film is based on a novel?

Jackie Brown (1997), adapted from Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch (1992).

Quentin Tarantino left Narbonne High School at 15 and spent about five years behind the counter of Video Archives, a video shop in Manhattan Beach, California, where customers came for his recommendations. Pulp Fiction won the Palme d’Or in 1994 and an Oscar for its screenplay, shared with Roger Avary. In June 2021 he published his first novel, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which he called “a complete rethinking of the entire story”: Cliff Booth gains a past as a prisoner of war, the film’s finale arrives early, and the characters argue about the films of the 1960s. Cinema Speculation (2022) collected essays on the American films of the 1970s he saw as a boy. On 8 December 2026 Harper publishes The Adventures of Cliff Booth, set in 1977. The ten writers below share his ground: crime, Los Angeles, the movies, and the pleasure of talking about all three.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Pulp crime · Hollywood and film criticism · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

The closest matches are Elmore Leonard, whose novel Rum Punch (1992) Tarantino filmed as Jackie Brown (1997); Pauline Kael, the New Yorker critic whose film writing inspired Cinema Speculation; and Nathanael West, whose The Day of the Locust (1939) was written by a Hollywood contract screenwriter about the film industry. Seven more follow, from a 1947 noir about a charming veteran who strangles women to the woman who visited a Manson follower in prison.

10 authors like Quentin Tarantino

The pulp original

Jim Thompson

American · The Killer Inside Me (1952), The Grifters (1963), Pop. 1280 (1964)

Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma Territory, in 1906 and died in Los Angeles in 1977. The Killer Inside Me is narrated by Lou Ford, an amiable, slightly dull-seeming deputy sheriff in a small Texas town who is a murderer; The Grifters was filmed by Stephen Frears in 1990. The critic Geoffrey O’Brien called him a “Dimestore Dostoevsky”.

Thompson wrote paperback crime in the voice of easy-going men capable of sudden violence, the register of Cliff Booth. Suits readers who want the pulp that Tarantino’s first novel imitates.

— Lisanne

The first Hollywood novel

Nathanael West

American · Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), The Day of the Locust (1939)

West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York in 1903. In 1933 he became a contract scriptwriter for Columbia Pictures, mostly on B movies, and drew the settings and minor characters of The Day of the Locust, his satire of the film industry, from his years in a hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. He and his wife, Eileen McKenney, were killed in a car crash in El Centro, California, in December 1940; he was 37.

West, like Tarantino in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, writes about the actors and hangers-on at the edges of the studios rather than the stars. Suits readers who want the darker, older version of that Hollywood.

— Lisanne

Los Angeles in hardboiled prose

Raymond Chandler

American-British · The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Long Goodbye (1953)

Chandler (1888–1959) was born in Chicago, educated at Dulwich College in London, and wrote his novels about the Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe. In “The Simple Art of Murder”, published in The Atlantic Monthly in December 1944, he attacked the English classic detective story for its contrived plots and praised Dashiell Hammett for realism.

Chandler made Los Angeles and the way its people talk the real subject of a crime story, which is what Tarantino’s dialogue does. Suits readers who like the city as much as the violence.

— Lisanne

The charming killer, unmasked

Dorothy B. Hughes

American · Ride the Pink Horse (1946), In a Lonely Place (1947), The Expendable Man (1963)

Hughes (1904–1993) was born in Kansas City. In a Lonely Place follows Dix Steele, an ex-airman in postwar Los Angeles who offers to help a detective friend with a serial-killer case while strangling women himself; two women, the actress Laurel Gray and his friend’s wife, quietly help the police close in. The 1950 film made Steele an innocent, hot-tempered screenwriter. She won an Edgar for her crime criticism in 1951 and was made a Grand Master in 1978.

Hughes takes the charming, violent veteran so beloved in Tarantino and shows him through the women who see what he is. Suits readers who want Los Angeles noir that argues with its own hero.

— Lisanne

The source of Jackie Brown

Elmore Leonard

American · LaBrava (1983), Get Shorty (1990), Rum Punch (1992)

Leonard (1925–2013) was born in New Orleans. Tarantino adapted Rum Punch as Jackie Brown (1997), with Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro; Get Shorty sends a loan shark into the film business. His ten rules of writing, published in The New York Times in 2001, include “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” He received the National Book Foundation’s medal in 2012.

Leonard’s criminals talk at length about everything except the crime, which is the source of a whole style of Tarantino dialogue. Suits readers who want the books behind the films.

— Lisanne

The critic he learned from

Pauline Kael

American · I Lost It at the Movies (1965), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968), Deeper into Movies (1973)

Kael (1919–2001) wrote for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991. Her long defence of Bonnie and Clyde, turned down by The New Republic, ran in The New Yorker in 1967; Deeper into Movies was the first book about film to win a National Book Award. Her 1971 essay “Raising Kane” credited Citizen Kane almost wholly to its screenwriter, and Peter Bogdanovich later showed she had used a UCLA academic’s research without credit.

Cinema Speculation was inspired by Kael’s writing, and it shares her conviction that a critic’s own excitement is evidence. Suits readers who liked Tarantino the critic more than Tarantino the novelist.

— Lisanne

The critic who became a director

François Truffaut

French · Hitchcock/Truffaut (1966)

Truffaut wrote criticism among the young writers of Cahiers du Cinéma before he directed films. Hitchcock/Truffaut, first published in French in 1966, grew out of a week of conversation with Alfred Hitchcock at Universal Studios in 1962, “an interview of fifty hours”, as Truffaut put it. Kent Jones’s 2015 documentary about the book features Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese and others on its influence.

A video-shop critic who became a director, Tarantino follows the path Truffaut took from the review page to the camera, and both write about other directors’ films with a fan’s detail. Suits readers who want the classic book of one filmmaker interrogating another.

— Lisanne

The 1970s and the 1990s

Peter Biskind

American · Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998), Down and Dirty Pictures (2004)

Biskind, born in 1940, was editor-in-chief of American Film and executive editor of Premiere from 1986 to 1996. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls tells how a generation of directors remade Hollywood in the late 1960s and 1970s; Down and Dirty Pictures covers Miramax, Sundance and the rise of independent film. Roger Ebert accused him of shaping his stories to fit an agenda.

Biskind writes the industry history of the two periods Tarantino cares most about: the 1970s films of Cinema Speculation and the independent boom that launched him. Suits readers who want the gossip as well as the films.

— Lisanne

The real 1969

Joan Didion

American · Play It as It Lays (1970), The White Album (1979)

Didion was born in Sacramento, California, in 1934. The title essay of The White Album, which opens “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”, follows her Los Angeles of the late 1960s and includes several prison meetings with Linda Kasabian, the former Manson follower who testified at the trial for the murder of Sharon Tate, an acquaintance of Didion’s. She died in 2021.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood rewrites the summer of 1969 as a fairy tale; Didion was there, and describes the fear the murders left behind. Suits readers who want to set Tarantino’s fantasy beside the record.

— Lisanne

Every book by Joan Didion →

French pulp with politics

Jean-Patrick Manchette

French · The Mad and the Bad (1972), Three to Kill (1976), The Prone Gunman (1981)

Manchette (1942–1995), born in Marseille, named the néo-polar, the French crime novels that from 1971 used the thriller for social criticism. A left-wing activist during the Algerian War, he wrote short, violent books translated into English by Donald Nicholson-Smith and James Brook. Eight films have been made from his novels, among them Claude Chabrol’s Nada (1974).

Manchette writes the fast, violent genre story Tarantino loves, with the camera-eye flatness of a film, but uses it to make political points. Suits readers who want pulp from outside America.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved Quentin Tarantino

If you loved Jackie Brown, read Elmore Leonard.

Rum Punch (1992), the novel it came from, then Get Shorty (1990).

If you loved Cinema Speculation, read Pauline Kael.

I Lost It at the Movies (1965), her first collection and a surprise bestseller.

If you loved the Hollywood of the novel, read Nathanael West.

The Day of the Locust (1939): the extras and dreamers at the edge of the studios.

If you loved Cliff Booth, read Dorothy B. Hughes.

In a Lonely Place (1947): a charming veteran in Los Angeles, seen through the women who doubt him.

If you want more Quentin Tarantino, start with the books.

Read Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2021), then Cinema Speculation (2022), and The Adventures of Cliff Booth when it is published on 8 December 2026.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Quentin Tarantino

Who writes like Quentin Tarantino?

Elmore Leonard and Jim Thompson for the crime and the talk, Nathanael West and Dorothy B. Hughes for Los Angeles, and Pauline Kael and François Truffaut for writing about film.

Does Quentin Tarantino have a new book?

Yes. The Adventures of Cliff Booth, a sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood set in 1977, is published by Harper on 8 December 2026, and by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK. It is his own version of The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, the film he wrote and David Fincher directed with Brad Pitt.

Which Quentin Tarantino book should I read first?

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2021) if you want fiction, or Cinema Speculation (2022) if you want his essays on the films of the 1970s.

Is the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood novel different from the film?

Yes. Tarantino called it “a complete rethinking of the entire story”: it adds Cliff Booth’s past as a prisoner of war, moves the film’s finale near the start, and gives chapters to the characters’ opinions of films and filmmakers.

What should I read after Cinema Speculation?

Pauline Kael’s I Lost It at the Movies (1965), François Truffaut’s Hitchcock/Truffaut (1966) and Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998).

Which Tarantino film is based on a novel?

Jackie Brown (1997), adapted from Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch (1992).

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like Quentin Tarantino

10 authors like Quentin Tarantino

Jim Thompson

Nathanael West

Raymond Chandler

Dorothy B. Hughes

Elmore Leonard

Pauline Kael

François Truffaut

Peter Biskind

Joan Didion

Jean-Patrick Manchette

Where to start if you loved Quentin Tarantino

Frequently asked questions about authors like Quentin Tarantino

Who writes like Quentin Tarantino?

Does Quentin Tarantino have a new book?

Which Quentin Tarantino book should I read first?

Is the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood novel different from the film?

What should I read after Cinema Speculation?

Which Tarantino film is based on a novel?

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