Cormac McCarthy Archive

The Dreamlike Language of Apocalypse

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
By reading worlds of relentless darkness, repeatedly made new through the language of dreams and fables, we can maybe more deeply access empathy and hope for the world we’re living in.

Confronting Our Environmental Apocalypse: Blood Meridian

Author: | Categories: Series No comments
Though Cormac McCarthy’s masterwork is neither a warning nor a statement of climate change, it is an imaginative and aesthetic example of how modern fiction can look beyond the confines of characters’ internal worlds to grapple with forces beyond our control.

Why Poetry Is Difficult

Author: | Categories: Writing No comments
Because there is language. Humanoids happened, then Homo sapiens happened, and somewhere down the line, we started to talk. Why? Because pictures weren’t enough. Because pictures, dazzling as they were (and still are), are a little less portable, less mutable to the nuances of our shifting perceptions.

Writ in Water: Reservation Round

Author: | Categories: Reading No comments
In a space like this, when we talk about genre fiction, we are often talking about its limitations: its conventions, its shallowness, its easy accessibility, its (overly) familiar repetitions, its elastic distance behind the invisible but razor-wired line of the literary.

Book vs. Movie: No Country for Old Men

Author: | Categories: Series No comments
If, while watching a movie with your spouse, you like to whisper “that didn’t happen in the book” (and who doesn’t?), then you’ll be sorely disappointed by a screening of No Country for Old Men. Virtually every scene and every line of dialogue in the Coen brothers’ Academy Award-winning

Out In This Desert

Author: | Categories: Reading No comments
When I’ve talked about the desert in various settings over the years—with family and friends, in academic contexts, with strangers outside of the desert—I’ve heard the same remarks time and again about the unviability of the landscape, the loneliness, the emptiness, the desolation. But there is a lot more

Round-Up: Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, Cormac McCarthy, and Neil Gaiman

Author: | Categories: Round-Up No comments
From Cormac McCarthy's death hoax to the new Neil Gaiman book, here's this week's biggest literary news:

Writ in Water: The Wet Years

Author: | Categories: Authors, Reading, Series, Writing No comments
I live near a cemetery in the Berkeley hills that has turned green from the rain. I do most of my jogging in the cemetery, and it reminds me—especially going uphill—that our time here is fleeting. I run among the dead, and I run among the deer and turkeys

Six Books to Light the Way Through the Darkest Night(s) of Your Soul

Author: | Categories: Reading, Series No comments
  John Gardner once wrote, “If there is good to be said, the writer should say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living.” While

Far Beyond the Pale in 1970’s Missouri: A Tiny Interview With Daren Dean

Author: | Categories: Authors, Interviews No comments
Daren Dean’s novel, Far Beyond the Pale, explores masculinity, religion, and delinquency in a coming of age story set in rural 1970’s Missouri. The novel follows Honeyboy who has moved back to Kingdom County, Missouri along with his mother following a stint in California. They return, in part, to leave