Cormac Mccarthy
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Cormac McCarthy’s Secret Muse, the Internet & Me December 20, 2024
There’s a curious resonance between writers and the names of their first biographers. Proust, for instance, twinkles in the eye of his infatuate Painter. Nabokov playfully outfoxes and hides in his Field. Larkin is blurred in Motion. Bellow wobbles b...
The Struggle To Separate Art From the Artist December 09, 2024
Aaron Gwyn, a novelist and English professor at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, was not always so interested in the written word.Growing up in Oklahoma, he was far from a star student. He had middling grades in high school, but when he arr...
Cormac McCarthy's Gnostic Conservatism November 25, 2024
But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!”—Matthew 6:23In 2005, arts critic Richard B. Woodward travelled to Santa Fe to profile Cormac McCarthy...
Life Lessons From My Correspondence with Lee McCarthy November 22, 2024
Like many middle-aged women I know, I spent my summer parsing the rallying calls of personhood and artmaking ringing out from the new roster of divorce books—books like All Fours by Miranda July, Liars by Sarah Manguso, and Splinters by Leslie Jamiso...
Cormac McCarthy’s Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence November 21, 2024
I’m about to tell you the craziest love story in literary history. And before you ransack the canon for a glamorous rebuttal, I must warn you: Its preeminence is conclusive. Dante and Beatrice, Scott and Zelda, Véra and Vladimir. All famous cases of ...
The Response To Art Is Everything November 15, 2024
After reading a large paragraph in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s short introduction to Sense and Nonsense, I took a hampered but hopeful breath and eyed the generous white space of the Northwestern University Press book. He wrote that in a genuine work of ...
On the Literary Influences of Cormac McCarthy October 11, 2024
One thing we learn from a study of influence is that critics do not approach reading in the same way that an artist does, or at least not in the way the artist Cormac McCarthy does. For instance, Rick Wallach, in an essay exploring kinships between B...
Celebrity Book Clubs Are Bad for Literature October 02, 2024
It started with Oprah, as many things do. In 1996 America’s most beloved talk show host launched her “book club” on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Each month a new novel was selected by Oprah, beamed into the homes of millions, and in many cases forever alt...
On Loving Cormac McCarthy’s Early Work May 02, 2024
In my freshman year at Yale, an English teacher gave me a bootleg copy of Cormac McCarthy’s 1973 novel, Child of God. The pages had been xeroxed and spiral bound, with a blank page of green construction paper serving as a front cover and the New York...
Hemingway, McCarthy, and Our ‘Used Up’ Words April 29, 2024
I used to dislike Ernest Hemingway’s style. His iceberg technique, with so much left beneath the surface, seemed cold in contrast to the sonatas of his contemporaries like F. Scott Fitzgerald. In a letter containing advice to the latter author, Hemin...
Notes on the Work of Cormac McCarthy January 17, 2024
Certain critics have suggested that Cormac McCarthy’s novels are based on pointless violence. It’s a common experience to read a book in which the world is portrayed as a nest of vipers who exterminate each other in the worst possible ways; human nat...
