Marlon James, Minnesota's Jamaica-born literary superstar, is having a great year.
Since winning the Man Booker Prize last year for his epic novel, "A Brief History of Seven Killings," he has crisscrossed the globe, sharing his works in Asia, Europe and the Americas – and drawing crowds everywhere he has landed.
The latest thing his budding celebrity has brought him: A three-hour interview with Hollywood royalty Brad Pitt, which was the cover of the New York Times' Style magazine on Sunday.
Both the writer and the subject are in the headline: "Five or Six Things I Didn't Know About Brad
Pitt, by Marlon James." In the interview, conducted in Pitt's Beverly Hills office, the two seem to be developing a bromance around shared interests, including admiration for Shigeru Ban, the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect, and The Clash, as evidenced by references to the group's late frontman Joe Strummer.
"There's a casual intimacy to the few hours we've spent together, shooting the breeze with a rapport so easy that I keep turning the recorder back on after I assume the interview is over," James wrote.
They talk movies, of course, and things that are close to both of their big hearts. And Pitt also reads from James' "Brief History," a prelude perhaps to the day when Quentin Tarantino, to whom James' smash-up style is often compared, may translate his poetic, brutal novel about violence in Jamaica (and crack in America) to the big screen.
Watch Pitt's reading here.
