David Vann's 6 favorite books

David Vann's new novel, Dirt, is a dark tale about the troubled relationship between a young man and his mother.

One of the author's six favorite books, as told to The Week magazine:

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

The strongest American writing has always been rural and regional and tragic, and Blood Meridian is our greatest novel, an heir to the work of Melville and Faulkner. McCarthy takes a garbage genre, the Western, and raises it to high literature, every sentence gorgeous.

Read about another book on the list.

Blood Meridian is one authority's pick for the Great Texas novel and is among Robert Olmstead's six favorite books, Michael Crummey's top ten literary feuds, Philip Connors's top ten wilderness books, six books that made a difference to Kazuo Ishiguro, Clive Sinclair's top 10 westerns, Maile Meloy's six best books, and David Foster Wallace's five direly underappreciated post-1960 U.S. novels. It appears on the New York Times list of the best American fiction of the last 25 years and among the top ten works of literature according to Stephen King.

--Marshal Zeringue