Regarded by many as one of America's finest-living writers, Cormac McCarthy has produced some of the most compelling novels of the last 40 years. Through the increasing number of cinematic adaptations of his work, including the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, and the Pulitzer Prize for The Road, McCarthy is entering the mainstream of cultural consciousness, both in the United States and abroad. In Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy, Peter Josyph considers, at length, the author's two masterworks Blood Meridian and Suttree, as well as the novel and film of All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy's play The Stonemason, and his film The Gardener's Son. The book also includes extended conversations with critic Harold Bloom about Blood Meridian; novelist and poet Robert Morgan about The Gardener's Son; critic Rick Wallach about Blood Meridian; and Oscar-winning screenwriter Ted Tally about his film adaptation of All the Pretty Horses. Drawing on multiple resources of an unconventional nature, this book examines McCarthy's work from original and sometimes provocative perspectives. Proposing a new notion of criticism, Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy will become a useful tool for critics, students, and general readers about one of the great literary talents of the day.

25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting 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, Blood Meridian 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. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

“Josyph takes an aggressively unconventional approach to McCarthy’s work, combining elements of travelogue, interview and memoir.” —The Washington Post In Cormac McCarthy’s House, author, painter, photographer, and actor-director Peter Josyph draws on a wide range of experience to pose provocative, unexpected questions about McCarthy’s work. As a visual artist, Josyph wrestles with the challenge of rendering McCarthy’s former home in El Paso as a symbol of a great writer’s workshop. As an actor and filmmaker, he analyzes the high art of Tommy Lee Jones in The Sunset Limited and No Country for Old Men. Invoking the recent suicide of a troubled friend, he grapples with the issue of “our brother’s keeper” in The Crossing and The Sunset Limited. But for Josyph, reading the finest prose-poet of our day is a project into which he invites many voices, and his investigations include a talk with Mark Morrow about photographing McCarthy while he was writing Blood Meridian; an in-depth conversation with director Tom Cornford on the challenges of staging The Sunset Limited and The Stonemason; a walk through the streets, waterfronts, and hidden haunts of Suttree with McCarthy scholar and Knoxville resident Wesley Morgan; insights from the cast of The Gardener’s Son about a controversial scene in that film; actress Miriam Colon’s perspective on portraying the Dueña Alfonsa opposite Matt Damon in All the Pretty Horses; and a harsh critique of Josyph’s views on The Crossing by McCarthy scholar Marty Priola, which leads to a sometimes heated debate. Illustrated with thirty-one photographs, Josyph’s unconventional journeys into the genius of Cormac McCarthy form a new, highly personal way of appreciating literary greatness.

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

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The second volume of the award-winning Border Trilogy—From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road—fulfills the promise of All the Pretty Horses and at the same time give us a work that is darker and more visionary, a novel with the unstoppable momentum of a classic western and the elegaic power of a lost American myth. In the late 1930s, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family's ranch. But instead of killing it, he decides to take it back to the mountains of Mexico. With that crossing, he begins an arduous and often dreamlike journey into a country where men meet ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat-lightning—a world where there is no order "save that which death has put there." An essential novel by any measure, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops, and starts the heart and mind at once. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

The Wrong Reader's Guide to Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses is an impassioned tribute to one of the most popular and enduring novels by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy.From his provocative reflection on the importance of McCarthy's dramatic prose-poetry in "How Cormac McCarthy Saved Civilization," to close readings of small moments that open up worlds of discovery, Josyph changes our perspective on this seminal work by one of our greatest living authors. In what he calls "a reader's memoir," Josyph invites noted McCarthy scholars such as Marty Priola and Wesley Morgan, as well as McCarthy's award-winning Portuguese translator Paolo Faria, to enrich his investigations with their expertise and insights.How is the hero of the novel like Shakespeare's Hamlet? Is it possible he is more a Comanche than a cowboy? Can a sympathetic protagonist be equally heroic and self-destructive? Exactly what sort of town is he leaving? How do film and audio renderings of McCarthy contribute to understanding his text? In answering such questions, Josyph raises others as he-a native New Yorker-walks his great city and also travels to significant locations in the novel, such as San Angelo, Texas, where the story begins.The Wrong Reader's Guide to Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses includes 14 color illustrations by the author.

We are not alone. Some call them devils or demons. But they are real. They are down there. And they are waiting for us to find them. In a cave in the Himalayas, a guide discovers a self-mutilated body with a warning: Satan exists. In the Kalahari Desert, a nun unearths evidence of a proto-human species and a deity called Older-than-Old. In Bosnia, something has been feeding upon the dead in a mass grave. So begins mankind’s most shocking realization: the underworld is a vast geological labyrinth populated by another race of beings. With all of Hell's precious resources and territories to be won, a global race ensues. Nations, armies, religions, and industries rush to colonize and exploit the subterranean frontier. A scientific expedition is launched westward to explore beneath the Pacific Ocean floor, both to catalog the riches there and to learn how life could develop in the sunless abyss. But in the dark underground, as humanity falls away from them, the scientists and mercenaries find themselves prey not only to the savage creatures, but also to their own treachery, mutiny, and greed. One thing is certain: Miles inside the earth, evil is very much alive.