Na stranici Red Hand Files fan je upitao Cavea bi li razmotrio sastavljanje liste s 40 knjiga koje voli. U odgovoru je Cave napisao: Inače, da bi odgovorio na ovo pitanje jednostavno bi otišao do police s knjigama i odabrao 40 naslova. Međutim, moje police s knjigama su u potpunosti prazne.
Potom je nastavio: Više od 5000 knjiga koje sam prikupio tijekom godina poslane su Danskoj kraljevskoj biblioteci u Copenhagenu. Sada su dio potpuno očaravajuće, odlične izložbe "Stranger Than Kindness".
Bez bibilioteke ispred mene teško mi je sastaviti opsežnu listu mojih 40 omiljenih knjiga. Najbolje što mogu je da da nabacam bez forme, nekoherentno, hrpu naslova koje mi padaju na pamet ovoga trena, a koje sam, iz ovog ili onog razloga, volio tijekom godina.
Cave je na koncu zaključio: Mislim da sam se zanio. Mislim da ih je pedeset - bez nekog posebnog redosljeda.
American Dreams – Sapphire
Break, Blow, Burn – Camille Paglia
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden – Denis Johnson
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
A Good Man is Hard to Find – Flannery O’Connor
I and Thou – Martin Buber
Straight Life – Art Pepper
The Bible – King James Edition
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
High Windows – Philip Larkin
The Conference of Birds – Attar of Nishapur
My Promised Land – Ari Shavit
The Christ at Chartres – Denis Saurat
King Leopold’s Ghost – Adam Hochschild
America a Prophecy – Jerome Rothenberg
Ariel – Sylvia Plath
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page – Gerald Basil Edwards
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
Shaking the Pumpkin – Jerome Rothenberg
The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson
The Collected Works of Saint Teresa of Avila
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
Mid-American Chants – Sherwood Anderson
Collected Works of Billy the Kid – Michael Ondaatje
American Murder Ballads and Their Stories – Olive Woolley Burt
Poems of W. B. Yeats – Selected by Seamus Heaney
The Good Lord Bird – James McBride
Consolations – David Whyte
Roget’s Thesaurus – Peter Mark Roget
Here I Am – Jonathan Safran Foer
Lives of the Saints – Alban Butler
Inferno/From an Occult Diary – August Strindberg
Poems 1959-2009 – Frederick Seidel
S.C.U.M Manifesto – Valerie Solanas
Complete Poems of E. E. Cummings
The Anatomy of Melancholy – Robert Burton
Dave Robicheaux Novels – James Lee Burke
Victory – Joseph Conrad
A Flower Book for the Pocket – Macgregor Skene
The Informers – Bret Easton Ellis
The Frog Prince – Stevie Smith
Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
Sanctuary – William Faulkner
Short Stories of Anton Chekhov
The Factory Series – Derek Raymond
The Dream Songs – John Berryman
Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl
Walkabout – James Vance Marshall
