Reading List
Jean-Baptiste Del Amo
French Novelist
Jean-Baptiste Del Amo is the pen name of Jean-Baptiste Garcia, a French writer born in Toulouse in 1981. His debut novel Une éducation libertine won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman in 2009. Règne animal, published in English as Animalia in Frank Wynne’s translation, won the Prix du Livre Inter in 2017, and Le Fils de l’homme, published as The Son of Man, won the Prix du roman Fnac in 2021. For Service95 he listed five books that inspired him while writing The Son of Man. His picks here are four of them: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Georg Trakl’s poems and Bruno Schulz’s The Cinnamon Shops.
Poems and Prose
A Bilingual Edition
by Georg Trakl · 2005 · Classics
“His images of organic nature, the funereal themes that run through his work and his exploration of forbidden desire move me profoundly. The way he brings together colours, dawns and landscapes is extraordinary.” — via Reading List, February 2026
Collected Stories
by Bruno Schulz · 2018 · Classics
“The Cinnamon Shops is an imaginative text in which everyday reality is transformed through memory, dream and metamorphosis. What moved me most deeply is the way the figure of the father is explored through an almost mythological lens” — via Reading List, February 2026
Blood Meridian
Or the Evening Redness in the West
by Cormac McCarthy · 1985 · Fiction
“This highly visual approach left a deep impression on me as a reader and encouraged me to seek a language of vision and sensation.” — via Reading List, February 2026
Absalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner · 1990 · Classics
“I was particularly struck by the way he lends a lyrical voice to characters who are ordinary people and do not necessarily have much education.” — via Reading List, February 2026
