Joel Coen Books

The screenplay to another offbeat movie by the Academy Award-winning Coen brothers. As a result of a case of mistaken identity, Jeffrey Lebowski - alias The Dude - finds himself entangled in a kidnapping caper as a bag man - a situation that goes from bad to even worse due to the interference of his hapless bowling partners.

It's easy to see why Raising Arizona is one of the best and most beloved films that Ethan and Joel Coen have yet to create. The cultish humor, original characters, fresh cinematography, catchy soundtrack, and zany yet well-structured plot to be found in this film are all Coen brothers trademarks. Nicholas Cage plays a veteran criminal who marries a prison guard named Edwina (Holly Hunter). Because he and his wife cannot conceive, our convict-hero kidnaps, with only the most earnest intentions, one of the famous "Arizona Quintuplets." A hellacious bounty-hunting biker and two old pals who have just escaped from the pen make it very hard for the couple to raise their child properly.This is a movie—and a screenplay—marked by breathless chases, improbable scenes, and hilarious dialogue throughout.

From the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road comes a "profoundly disturbing and gorgeously rendered" novel (The Washington Post) that returns to the Texas-Mexico border, setting of the famed Border Trilogy. The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law—in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell—can contain. As Moss tries to evade his pursuers—in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives—McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines. No Country for Old Men is a triumph. Look for Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Passenger, coming October '22.