Shortlist is a column where PS share the people we admire and the literary ephemera they adore.

Sofia Coppola was baptised in cinema. As an infant she appeared in her father’s film The Godfather as baby Michael Francis Rizzi, during a kismetic baptism scene. If fate is real, it touched the shoulders of Sofia Coppola and anointed her as the next great American director. Bestowing upon her a predestined body of work that has earned her an oscar, a golden globes and a Golden Lion.

Sofia Coppola’s pathway to cinema was gilded from birth, but there is no entitlement to art, it stands on its own, as do Coppola’s films.

As always with the PS editorial team, we are interested in the artists’ sources of inspiration. Below is a shortlist of Sofia Coppola’s favourite books and our pithy one line reviews.

The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

A satiric anatomy of American society.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion

Didion’s musings on press, politics, crime barons and self doubt.

Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

Sharp and tender fiction.

Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney

New York, wit, fashion parties, youth, controlled substances and reckoning.

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

Lyrical mythologising of suburban America.

Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham

The hunger for experience.

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

The upheaval of lockdown.

The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen

The female experience written in masterpiece form.

Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson

The fiction of the self.

Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima

Threatened aristocracy.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

A love that abandons.

Elvis and Me by Priscilla Beaulieu Presley with Sandra Harmon

Her love story.

Shortlist compiled by Pages Editorial.