Is there anything better than a good book? At UNP, the answer is most often ‘no,’ but a movie or TV show inspired by a book is a close second. November was an exciting month for tv-adaptions of UNP books, so we’re sharing backlist titles that can also be experienced on the big screen.

Come along with us to Hollywood!

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

The author of The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig was the very person who inspired Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel. The film follows a writer who encounters the owner of an aging high-class hotel, who tells him of his early years serving as a lobby boy in the hotel’s glorious years under an exceptional concierge.

Written as both a recollection of the past and a warning for future generations, The World of Yesterday recalls the golden age of literary Vienna—its seeming permanence, its promise, and its devastating fall. Surrounded by the leading literary lights of the epoch, Stefan Zweig draws a vivid and intimate account of his life and travels through Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and London, touching on the very heart of European culture.

Bridge of Spies (2015)

Operation Overflight is the true story that inspired the feature film Bridge of Spies. Directed by Steven Spielberg, the film takes place during the Cold War and follows an American Lawyer recruited to defend an arrested Soviet spy in court, and then help the CIA facilitate an exchange of the spy for the Soviet-captured American U2 spy plane pilot, Francis Gary Powers.

Operation Overflight is the new edition of Powers’ classic 1970 memoir about the notorious U-2 incident. In it, pilot Francis Gary Powers reveals the full story of what actually happened in the most sensational espionage case in Cold War history.

The Revenant (2015)

Inspired by the life of Hugh Glass–explored by John Myers Myers in The Saga of Hugh Glass, as well as Frederick Manfred in Lord Grizzly, and acclaimed poet John G. Neihardt in Cycle of the West—The Revenant follows a frontiersman on a fur trading expedition in the 1820s who has to fight for survival after being mauled by a bear and left for dead by members of his own hunting team.

The Saga of Hugh Glass details a time before his most fabulous adventure, when Glass was captured by the buccaneer Jean Lafitte and turned pirate himself until his first chance to escape. Soon he fell prisoner to the Pawnees and lived for four years as one of them before he managed to make his way to St. Louis.

Lord Grizzly is the second volume of Frederick Manfred’s acclaimed five-volume series, The Buckskin Man Tales. It depicts Hugh’s rage after the famous bear attack which drove him to crawl two hundred miles across dangerous territory to seek revenge until he was no longer Hugh Glass but had become Lord Grizzly.

Unquestionably the masterpiece of the poet who has been called the “American Homer,” A Cycle of the West celebrates the land and legends of the Old West in five narrative poems, including The Song of Hugh Glass (1915).

Lawmen: Bass Reeves (2023)

Inspired by books 1 and 2 of Sidney Thompson’s The Bass Reeves Trilogy, Paramount+ recently released Lawmen: Bass Reeves, produced by Taylor Sheridan and David Oyelowo. The show follows the journey of Reeves (Oyelowo) and his rise from enslavement to law enforcement as one of the first Black U.S. Deputy Marshals west of the Mississippi. Despite arresting over 3,000 outlaws during his career, the weight of the badge was heavy, and he wrestled with its moral and spiritual cost to his beloved family.

Follow the Angels, Follow the Doves is an origin story in the true American tradition. Before Bass Reeves could stake his claim as the most successful nineteenth-century American lawman, arresting more outlaws than any other deputy during his thirty-two-year career as a deputy U.S. marshal in some of the most dangerous regions of the Wild West, he was a slave.

Set in 1884, Hell on the Border tells the story of Bass Reeves at the peak of his historic career. Famous for being a crack shot as well as for his nonviolent tendencies, Reeves uses his African American race to his strategic advantage. Along with a tramp or cowboy disguise, Reeves appears so nonthreatening that he often positions himself close enough to the outlaws he is pursuing to arrest them without bloodshed.

In The Forsaken and the Dead we meet Reeves again. In the 1890s, past his prime, Reeves proceeds through the valleys and shadows of Indian and Oklahoma Territories. Despite his caution and innovations as a lawman and detective, his nation no longer seems a product of his own making—so much like his children and his marriage to Jennie. While a modern world implodes around him and demons from his past continue to haunt his present, he remains resolute in his faith that he can be a steady rider on a pale horse.

Godfall

Van Jensen’s sci-fi thriller, Godfall, has been picked up by Imagine TV and is set to be adapted into a television series directed by Ron Howard.

When a massive asteroid hurtles toward Earth, humanity braces for annihilation—but the end doesn’t come. In fact, it isn’t an asteroid but a three-mile-tall alien that drops down, seemingly dead, outside Little Springs, Nebraska. Dubbed “the giant,” its arrival transforms the red-state farm town into a top-secret government research site and major metropolitan area, flooded with soldiers, scientists, bureaucrats, spies, criminals, conspiracy theorists—and a murderer.