Cormac McCarthy

<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>Part bildungsroman, part horse opera, part meditation on courage and loyalty, this beautifully crafted novel won the National Book Award in 1992. The plot is simple enough. John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old dispossessed Texan, crosses the Rio Grande into Mexico in 1949, accompanied by his pal Lacey Rawlins. The two precocious horsemen pick up a sidekick--a laughable but deadly marksman named Jimmy Blevins--encounter various adventures on their way south and finally arrive at a paradisiacal <em>hacienda</em> where Cole falls into an ill-fated romance. Readers familiar with McCarthy's Faulknerian prose will find the writing more restrained than in <em>Suttree</em> and <em>Blood Meridian</em>. Newcomers will be mesmerized by the tragic tale of John Grady Cole's coming of age. </p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>This is a novel so exuberant in its prose, so offbeat in its setting and so mordant and profound in its deliberations that one searches in vain for comparisons in American literature. None of McCarthy's previous works, not even the award-winning The Orchard Keeper (1965) or the much-admired Blood Meridian (1985), quite prepares the reader for the singular achievement of this first installment in the projected Border Trilogy. John Grady Cole is a 16-year-old boy who leaves his Texas home when his grandfather dies. With his parents already split up and his mother working in theater out of town, there is no longer reason for him to stay. He and his friend Lacey Rawlins ride their horses south into Mexico; they are joined by another boy, the mysterious Jimmy Blevins, a 14-year-old sharpshooter. Although the year is 1948, the landscape--at some moments parched and unforgiving, at others verdant and gentled by rain--seems out of time, somewhere before history or after it. These likable boys affect the cowboy's taciturnity--they roll cigarettes and say what they mean--and yet amongst themselves are given to terse, comic exchanges about life and death. In McCarthy's unblinking imagination the boys suffer truly harrowing encounters with corrupt Mexican officials, enigmatic bandits and a desert weather that roils like an angry god. Though some readers may grow impatient with the wild prairie rhythms of McCarthy's language, others will find his voice completely transporting. In what is perhaps the book's most spectacular feat, horses and men are joined in a philosophical union made manifest in the muscular pulse of the prose and the brute dignity of the characters. "What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them," the narrator says of John Grady. As a bonus, Grady endures a tragic love affair with the daughter of a rich Spanish Hacendado , a romance, one hopes, to be resumed later in the trilogy. <br />Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>

Now a major motion picture from Columbia Pictures starring Matt Damon, produced by Mike Nichols, and directed by Billy Bob Thornton. The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's **Border Trilogy** , **All the Pretty Horses** is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction. *From the Trade Paperback edition.* ### Amazon.com Review Part bildungsroman, part horse opera, part meditation on courage and loyalty, this beautifully crafted novel won the National Book Award in 1992. The plot is simple enough. John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old dispossessed Texan, crosses the Rio Grande into Mexico in 1949, accompanied by his pal Lacey Rawlins. The two precocious horsemen pick up a sidekick--a laughable but deadly marksman named Jimmy Blevins--encounter various adventures on their way south and finally arrive at a paradisiacal *hacienda* where Cole falls into an ill-fated romance. Readers familiar with McCarthy's Faulknerian prose will find the writing more restrained than in *Suttree* and *Blood Meridian*. Newcomers will be mesmerized by the tragic tale of John Grady Cole's coming of age. ### From Publishers Weekly Muller's straightforward, unembellished reading suits the spare drama of McCarthy's acclaimed novel, which has recently been released as a movie as well. John Grady Cole and his pal Lacey Rawlins set off on horseback for Mexico in the late 1940s in search of work and adventure. Along the way they are joined by another man, named Blevins. On a hacienda in Mexico, Cole displays his uncanny gift for working with horses, and he and Alejandra, the beautiful daughter of the hacienda's owner, fall in love--a love that is displeasing not only to Alejandra's father but also to her imperious but not unsympathetic great aunt. Muller's accent in conveying Mexican voices is as convincing and unforced as his others, and he evokes equally well a distinctive personality for each character--the laconic and stalwart Cole; the more emotional and impatient Rawlins; Blevins with his concomitant braggadocio and fear--and yet this tale is perhaps not best suited to the unabridged audio format. Long stretches of text convey slow-moving action or no action at all, but rather McCarthy's lush evocation of the wild landscape. Listeners may opt for the abridged audio version of this National Book Award winner. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

SUMMARY: An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

In this magnificent new novel, the National Book Award-winning author of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing fashions a darkly beautiful elegy for the American frontier. The setting is New Mexico in 1952, where John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are working as ranch hands. To the North lie the proving grounds of Alamogordo; to the South, the twin cities of El Paso and Juarez, Mexico. Their life is made up of trail drives and horse auctions and stories told by campfire light. It is a life that is about to change forever, and John Grady and Billy both know it. The catalyst for that change appears in the form of a beautiful, ill-starred Mexican prostitute. When John Grady falls in love, Billy agrees--against his better judgment--to help him rescue the girl from her suavely brutal pimp. The ensuing events resonate with the violence and inevitability of classic tragedy. Hauntingly beautiful, filled with sorrow, humor and awe, Cities of the Plain is a genuine American epic.

<div> <p>From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road comes a "profoundly disturbing and gorgeously rendered" novel (The Washington Post) that returns to the Texas-Mexico border, setting of the famed Border Trilogy. The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law—in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell—can contain. As Moss tries to evade his pursuers—in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives—McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines. No Country for Old Men is a triumph. </p> <p>Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.</p></div> SUMMARY: In his blistering new novel, Cormac McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, setting of his famed Border Trilogy. The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law–in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell–can contain.As Moss tries to evade his pursuers–in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives–McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines. No Country for Old Men is a triumph.

NEW YORK TIMES **BEST SELLER** **• T** **he second volume of The Passenger series, from** **The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of** The Road ***** *• An** **intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence. ** " **The richest and strongest work of McCarthy’s career…An achievement greater than** Blood Meridian **…or…** The Road **.” —** The Atlantic 1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, *Stella Maris* is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to *The Passenger,* a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.

The screenplay for McCarthy's classic film, bearing in full measure his gift—the ability to fit complex and universal emotions into ordinary lives and still preserve all of their power and significance In the spring of 1975 the film director Richard Pearce approached Cormac McCarthy with a screenplay idea. Though already a widely acclaimed novelist, the author of such modern classics as *The Orchard Keeper* and *Child of God* , McCarthy had never before written a screenplay. Using a few photographs in the footnotes to a 1928 biography of a famous pre–Civil War industrialist as inspiration, McCarthy and Pearce roamed the mill towns of the South researching their subject. A year later McCarthy finished *The Gardener's Son* , a taut, riveting drama of impotence, rage, and violence spanning two generations of mill owners and workers, fathers and sons, during the rise and fall of one of America's most bizarre utopian industrial experiments. Produced as a two-hour film and broadcast on PBS in 1976, *The Gardener's Son* received two Emmy Award nominations and was shown at the Berlin and Edinburgh Film Festivals. Set in Graniteville, South Carolina, *The Gardener's Son* is the tale of two families: the wealthy Greggs, who own and operate the local cotton mill, and the McEvoys, a family of mill workers beset by misfortune. The action opens as Robert McEvoy, a young mill worker, is having his leg amputated after an accident rumored to have been caused by James Gregg, the son of the mill's founder. Crippled and consumed by bitterness, McEvoy deserts both his job and his family. Returning two years later at the news of his mother's terminal illness, McEvoy arrives only to confront the grave diggers preparing her final resting place. His father, the mill's gardener, is now working on the factory line, the gardens forgotten. These proceedings stoke the slow-burning rage McEvoy carries within him, a fury that will ultimately consume both families.

The acclaimed first novel from one of America's most celebrated novelists, the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road • Set is a remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, it is the story of a young boy and a bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father. The boy, John Wesley Rattner, and the outlaw, Marion Sylder–together with Rattner's Uncle Ather, who belongs to a former age in his communion with nature and his stoic independence–enact a drama that seems born of the land itself. All three are heroes of an intense and compelling celebration of values lost to time and industrialization. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road • A startling encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life or death decision must be made. In that small apartment, “Black” and “White,” as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history, mining the origins of two fundamentally opposing world views. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the men–though he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is desperate to deny it. Their aim is no less than this: to discover the meaning of life. Deft, spare, and full of artful tension, The Sunset Limited is a beautifully crafted, consistently thought-provoking, and deceptively intimate work by one of the most insightful writers of our time. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. ### Review “A brilliantly articulated piece, penned by a wildly acclaimed fiction writer. Nothing short of dazzling. So astonishingly effecting, so powerful, so stimulating!” –_Chicago Tribune_ ### Product Description A startling encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life or death decision must be made. In that small apartment, “Black” and “White,” as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history, mining the origins of two fundamentally opposing world views. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the men–though he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is desperate to deny it. Their aim is no less than this: to discover the meaning of life. Deft, spare, and full of artful tension, *The Sunset Limited* is a beautifully crafted, consistently thought-provoking, and deceptively intimate work by one of the most insightful writers of our time.