Cormac McCarthy Books

This is some of the best writing I have ever run into. Incredible! Different. Excellent!

This is the best book I have ever read. My favorite book used to be "The Fools Progress" by Ed Abbey, but McCarthy's theme of regeneration thru violence is written so eloquently, it makes me cry. I can't understand how a person can write about scalping Indians in 1860's Mexico and not have people gasping in horror, but you can't put it down once you start. The story makes one wonder about the history of this country, and the people who settled the west. I particularly liked the scenes in old San Diego and the Colorado River. I can't forget about the mercury miners and their burros carrying mercury in the Sierra Madres. And the kid was one of my favorite literary characters ever. Not loveable or even likeable, but fully materialized. I'm looking forward to reading "The Road" next.

I NEVER HEARD OF THIS NOVEL UNTIL I WATCHED A HAROLD BLOOM INTERVIEW ON C-SPAN. HE CLAIMED IT WAS THE BEST FICTION WORK OF THE PAST FIFTY YEARS. I QUICKLY ORDERED IT AND BEGAN READING. McCARTHY'S WRITING WAS OVER DESCRIPTIVE IN RELATING THE LANDSCAPE IN WHICH THE STORY TOOK PLACE. IT TENDED TO BOG DOWN THE NARRATIVE. THE VIOLENT SCENES WERE GRAPHIC BUT TRUE TO THE PERIOD IN WHICH THE STORY TOOK PLACE. JUDGE HOLDEN IS LIKE AN EVIL CHARACTER OUT OF A STEPHEN KING NOVEL. THIS GAVE HIM A SUPERNATURAL QUALITY THAT MADE THIS WESTERN SO DIFFERENT. THE CHARACTER KNOWN AS KID, SEEMS TO BE THE ONLY ONE IN THE BOOK WITH A HUMAN HEART. THIS IS WHY IT CAN BE A DEPRESSING TALE TO READ. EVIL GETS ITS WAY EVEN IN THE LAST CHAPTER. THAT'S NOT WHAT I SLOGGED THROUGH 340 PAGES FOR.

I read a lot. I can't think of a better book. Blood Meridian, "the kid," "the judge" and the rest are in my head for good.

This novel is landmark. McCarthy uses settings and actual events of the American west to cut away the superfluous flesh of modern fiction and reveal humanity's rawest. Also a fan of other great southern writers like Faulkner and Penn Warren, I found the prose of Blood Meridian tearfully beautiful and the content atrociously engaging. The portraits he paints of scene and deed are unrivaled; such violence portrayed so eloquently reveals again McCarthys gift for description. The character development is masterful, and the themes presented herein flash through one's mind years later. This book forces us to consider evil, authority, and perhaps divinity anew and is as beautiful as it is powerful. In my estimation this is McCarthy's greatest work to date, and I find it no surprise that this novel was his first to be inducted into the Modern Library. I hope you appreciate and enjoy this literary masterwork as I have.

Mary McCarthy has never gotten her due as a prose writer and this -- her best novel -- seems to have been overlooked. This is the story of a young man 's emancipation from his very much loved mother (with whom he has an almost romantic relationship based on her attractiveness and their shared sensibility). They construct an ideal life together in which they eschew all "modern" conveniences for the niceties of the past. She remarries and he is launched as an adult, going to Paris to school, where he attempts to apply his interpretation of Kant's moral imperative to the various experiences he has (including one very funny-painful episode in which he invites a urine-soaked clochard to share his quarters). It is a completely delightful book and can be reread with pleasure. She is a master story teller.

I was so incredibly inspired by someone that truly understands Kantian ethics, and how to apply them. Mary McCarthy was obviously very well educated and intelligent, this book was so good that I was wondering why she was not a part of the literature classes that I took in college. Her very endearing and intimate writing style has me in awe. I really want to send this book to my former philosophy professor and see what he thinks. If you like a good novel and philosophy both, read this book.

Although the subtitle of this book might seem stilted--aimed at pedantic scholars and too narrow to garner much readership--I predict that this book will win over anyone who reads very far into it.

True, this is a work of astute scholarship, but it is argued in an engaging, winsome, and intelligent voice. It crackles with vitality, brimming with fresh insights and contagious enthusiasm for Cormac McCarthy's novels. Jay Ellis sees the light in the darkness, and he shines his own light on it so that the reader may see too, so that the puzzled McCarthy reader may look here and be puzzled no more.

Cormac McCarthy's new novel, THE ROAD, will be out soon, and reviewers everywhere will be comparing it to Hemingway and to Jose Saramago's BLINDNESS, which won the Nobel Prize for that deserving author. Jay Ellis could not possibly have known what was in the upcoming novel, yet his study anticipates the love and father/son relationship in THE ROAD, and he ties it to the earlier novels in a most remarkable way.

To praise NO PLACE FOR HOME is not to belittle the enormously valuable crit-lit that has gone before, and Jay Ellis is quick to give credit to others both in the notes and the text. But this volume is spectacular, a singular feat. It is a must-have, second only to John Sepich's rare NOTES ON BLOOD MERIDIAN on my own list of valuable McCarthy must-haves. And whereas Sepich dealt only with BLOOD MERIDIAN, this study illuminates all of McCarthy's novels--and those yet to come.

There are eight chapters that follow each other in a natural sequence, a complete bibliography, luscious notes, and a helpful index. All in all, a masterful work.

Jay Ellis's delightfully original and urbane treatment of the finest American novelist since Faulkner and Hemingway exemplifies the best tradition of crossover criticism.

In a style that is edgy, electric, and intensely personal, Ellis probes into the complex worlds of McCarthy's fiction as if they were matters of life and death, which of course they are. Ellis's range of psychological, linguistic, literary and and cultural references doesn't ever appear forced or pretentious. In fact one of the book's achievements is to maintain a sense of spontaneity throughout.

A rare combination of insightful close readings, stimulating tangents and a number of very big and engaging ideas, the book reads as if Ellis (a novelist himself) decided to pour the same level of energy and feeling into a work of scholarship as he would into a work of his own fiction. The result is both provocative and passionate, a tribute of the sort that every great writer deserves but seldom sees in his or her lifetime.

I have not yet read a better guide to McCarthy's work for either the layman or the scholar. Wherever there are dedicated readers of McCarthy, NO PLACE FOR HOME will be there.

While not for everyone, if you are really curious as to what you missed the first time through Blood Meridian, this book will really help. It borrows from John Sepich's Notes on Blood Meridian, but it has a lot more information like definitions of vocabulary, translations of all the foreign languages, short sketches on the historical characters and incidents in the novel. It is also organized in a reader friendly way. It is set up to reference the pages in Blood Meridian, so it is very easy to read side-by-side with the novel. All in all, I really found it useful.

A READER'S GUIDE TO BLOOD MERIDIAN is just what the title proclaims, providing a comprehensive glossary for all of the difficult terms, translations of the novel's many foreign words and phrases, and much of the lore behind the novel's historical characters and places.

Shane Schimpf provides an overview first, which includes a Nietzsche-derived interpretation of the novel. While this interpretation is as valid as any, and might seem handy for college students, readers should be aware that it is not the only interpretation. Just one of many. I wish that Mr. Schimpf had provided notations of the alternative published arguments or else had toned down or omitted this part of it and let readers choose their own interpretations. A guide should simply be a guide.

There follows the heart of the book, in an easy-to-read font. An examination of the epigraphs is followed by a page-by-page, chapter-by-chapter annotation of the novel. Many of the entries are brief, but often he pauses to give short biographies or extended explanations. There is a handy subject index followed by a bibliography of sources. New readers and college students will find this an immensely valuable and enlightening work.

The author acknowledges his debt to John Sepich's NOTES ON BLOOD MERIDIAN, the standard authority on McCarthy's masterpiece since 1993, and this more accessible volume will likely reach a much wider audience.

No work such as this is definitive, as the author freely admits, and a second and revised edition of this work is almost inevitable somewhere down the line.

This is one of the finest books I've ever read. I've heard McCarthy compared with William Faulkner, and perhaps without Faulkner, we wouldn't have McCarthy. But, nowhere in Faulkner, or any other writer, have I encountered such fearless and unencumbered writing; such clarity. It is barely noticable that it's written in play form. Ancient and completely familiar; the writing is just like the simplicity, weight and gravity of the stone he describes.

I don't usually read plays, but I bought this one because, after finishing _Cities of the Plain_, I had read all of Cormac McCarthy's novels and was hungry for more. I was not disappointed. McCarthy's genius is no less evident in _The Stonemason_ than in any of his longer works; if anything, the shorter format of drama allows him to pack even more of his brilliant writing into every page. Many authors are said to have "an ear for dialogue"; McCarthy is the only one I know, of whom this is unquestionably true. Perhaps this explains the effortlessness with which he switches between his usual milieu (novels about white cowboys and outlaws) to the material in this book (a play about black craftsmen). Any more praise I can give to this work, and to McCarthy's other writings, cannot convey the tremendous power -- the sadness and joy - that one experiences in reading them. I only hope he still has some more books left in him.

As I read Blood Meridian, I jotted down words that were either unusual or new to me or familiar yet not quite recognizable. This is the case with every McCarthy book one reads - astonishment at the writer's extensive vocabulary. I've deliberately left out most of the directly Spanish terms or Mexican off-shoots. So, anyway, here is one list of words you need to know in order to read Blood Meridian thoroughly. Each reader can come up with a similar list, I am sure.
THE LIST: swale; sprent; carbolic; coping (not the verb); swagged; chancel; sacristy; purlieu; awap; ramada; weskit; mortice; felloes; duledge; panniers; jornada; bistre; suttee; jacal; cantle; bandoliers; manciple; midden; revetment; charivari; imbreachment; withy; vidette; dunnage; thrapple; morral; selvage; lazarous; galena; sotol; kerf; stanched; tonsured; talus; vadose; ratchel; corbels; squailed; bated; slag; rebozo; almagre; fusil; carboy; malandered; gantlet (gauntlet?); flensed; quirt; thews; rill; luff; querent; aubergine; surbated; sark; playa; cassinette; scows; replivine; lemnisate; fulgurite; scrog; preterite (shades of Pynchon); gastine; marl; remuda; lobation; dap; cantonment; ignis fatuus; yaw; spangle; duff; escarpment; enfilade; rill; crenelated; roweled; rebus; esker; supernummeraries; serried; devenian; ristra; pulque; auger; archimandrite; thaumaturge . . .

. . . . and the list could go on, for I'm skimming the surface here, not for this one novel alone, but all of them. I've compared the volabulary of recent Roth books and DeLillo books and others, and nothing comes close to the vastness of McCarthy's lexicon. And then, as I've mentioned already, there are all the Spanish words, the Latin. Reading McCarthy reminds me mostly of the prose in Beckett's MOLLOY trilogy. There too you reach for the dictionary every page or so. Same pace, poetic intensity, fury almost, fluidity, biblical density. (Let's not even think about Faulkner here!)

At any rate, test the words on your friends if you like, or do nothing at all with them. Interesting all the same.

Lei este libro cuando recién salio en ingles. Puedo confirmarles que se trata de una joya literaría. Es extremadamente triste y por momentos muy angustiante. Se trata de la historia de un padre y su hijo. Ambos vagan sin rumbo fijo por la carretera. El mundo como lo conocemos ha dejado de existir, todo esta quemado, hay tribus de canibales y peligros por todos lados y no pueden confiar en nadie. El padre en un gran esfuerzo trata todo lo posible de enseñarle a su hijo que ELLOS son los "tipos buenos" y que son los que llevan "la luz". La verdad les recomiendo este libro, tienen que tenerlo en su colección. Pronto se estrenará una pelicula basada en el mismo, actua nada más y nada menos que Viggo Mortensen (Aragon en "Lord of the Rings) como el padre que cuidará a su hijo por esta travesía despiadada en un mundo post apocalíptico.

I am enjoying the book. Shipping was so-so but that is what they told me up front so I'm satisfied.

though need to get out the dictionary sometimes:
mythopoetic gestures, profundity, epitome....

this is really excellent; looking forward to rereading the 20 cent copy of all the preety horses i just ordered with my girlfriend and this book's insights into this great writer (my favorite)

In some ways, I feel MacCarthy's writing soars in her memoirs t even higher heights than in her fiction. She paints a wonderfully compelling picture of a time, a place, gender and politics.