Quentin Tarantino Working on Two Books, Including Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Novel

One of the industry’s most popular directors — and easily one of its biggest fans — is bringing his love of movies from the screen to the page. On Tuesday, news broke that Quentin Tarantino had signed a publishing deal with Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins, to release two brand new books. The first of the two books will be a work of fiction, a novelization of his recent Best Picture nominee, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The second will be a nonfiction book about film in the ’70s.

The book will expand on the lore of the two central characters from the movie: Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton and Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth. Tarantino has long had a love of movie novelizations, an art form that has largely disappeared from the mainstream media in recent years.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood will be released next summer, with a deluxe hardback edition following in the fall. In addition to the novelization, Tarantino will write a book described as a “deep dive into the movies of the 1970s,” called Cinema Speculation.

“In the seventies movie novelizations were the first adult books I grew up reading,” said Tarantino. “And to this day I have a tremendous amount of affection for the genre. So as a movie-novelization aficionado, I’m proud to announce Once Upon A Time In Hollywood my contribution to this often marginalized, yet beloved sub-genre in literature. I’m also thrilled to further explore my characters and their world in a literary endeavor that can (hopefully) sit alongside its cinematic counterpart.”

“Quentin Tarantino’s literary talents have been in plain sight since his first scripts, but to see how skillfully he endows his characters with life on the page and how he constantly takes a reader by surprise, even one who knows the movie by heart, is to see a master storyteller trying on a new form and making it his own,” said Vice President and Executive Editor Noah Eaker.

Are you looking forward to checking out Quentin Tarantino’s new books? Let us know in the comments!