Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Quentin Tarantino was born in 1963 in Knoxville, Tennessee. He is the writer-director of nine feature films, the winner of two Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay, and the author of the novel Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Cinema Speculation is his first work of nonfiction.

"Quentin Tarantino's first novel is, to borrow a phrase from his oeuvre, a tasty beverage...He's here to tell a story, in take-it-or-leave-it Elmore Leonard fashion, and to make room along the way to talk about some of the things he cares about - old movies, male camaraderie, revenge and redemption, music and style...In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino makes telling a page-turning story look easy, which is the hardest trick of all." - Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Classic, sparks-flying Tarantino...Tarantino's explosive dialogue, with its blend of streetwise and formal cadences, is almost as effective written down as read aloud...Far from being the throwaway artifact it sometimes pretends to be, Tarantino's first novel may even, as he's hinted, herald the start of a new direction for this relentlessly inventive director." - The Washington Post

"Tarantino, celebrated for his screenplays, truly is a literary force, stepping forward as a novelist adept at using an omniscient point of view to powerful effect in a novel driven by its characters' inner lives and smart, witty, and salty dialogue of propulsion and nuance, hilarity and heartbreak....It will also offer a stereoscopic experience for most readers as they envision the characters as played by the movie's cast...a doubling that will inspire fanatic comparisons between film and page. But this is a work of literary art in its own right, a novel that, if the movie didn't exist, would captivate readers with its own knowing vision and zestful power." - Donna Seaman, Booklist