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The works of Cormac McCarthy have been critically studied as literature of the South and of the Border Southwest. Largely ignored is the omnipresence and presentation of animals in McCarthy’s works. Yet the abundant representations of animals depict a part of the ceaseless battle for survival that is inherent in many of his writings. McCarthy’s animals exist within the framework of a fictional natural world driven by biological determinism: Wild animals prey upon feral and domestic animals, horses exist as warriors, and the hunt is a ballet between man and hunting hound. Proximity to humans results in mistreatment and death, while distance results in survival and fitness. McCarthy also utilizes animals as harbingers of specific events; for example, hogs are so frequently a precursor of human death that McCarthy’s narrators and characters wonder whether hogs are joined to the devil for evil purposes. The first chapter here examines animal presentations in The Stonemason, The Gardener’s Son and two short stories, “Bounty” and “The Dark Waters.” The following nine chapters focus on one text, one type of animal—feline, swine, bovine, bird and bat, canine, equine, lupine, and hound—and one particular thesis. Each chapter also briefly examines the specific animal as it exists in other McCarthy works. ... Read more

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This is nonfiction commentary. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Blood Meridian, the Road, No Country for Old Men, All the Pretty Horses, Suttree, the Crossing, Child of God, Cities of the Plain, the Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, is a 1985 Western novel by American author Cormac McCarthy. It was McCarthy's fifth book and was published by Random House. The narrative follows a teenage runaway referred to only as "the kid", with the bulk of the text devoted to his experiences with the Glanton gang, a historical group of scalp hunters who massacred Indians and others on the United StatesMexico borderlands in 1849 and 1850. The role of antagonist is gradually filled by Judge Holden, an extremely large and intelligent man utterly devoted to violence and conflict. Much of the book is based on Glanton gang member Samuel Chamberlain's memoir My Confession, which has been criticized by historians as unreliable. Chamberlain is not a character in Blood Meridian. Critics considered Blood Meridian generally historically accurate, and it includes numerous references to contemporaneous occurrences. Although the novel initially earned lukewarm critical and commercial reception, it has since become widely recognized not only as McCarthy's masterpiece, but also as one of the acclaimed American novels of the 20th century. Cormac McCarthy wrote Blood Meridian while living on the money from his 1981 MacArthur Fellows grant. It is his first novel set in the American Southwest, a change from the Appalachian settings of his earlier work. Describing events of extreme violence, McCarthy's prose is sparse yet expansive, with an often biblical quality and frequent religious references. The book features McCarthy's unusual writ...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=1528733 ... Read more

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Chinese edition of "The Road" that won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize by Cormac McCarthy who has written several bestselling books including 'No Country for Old Men'. This eloquent and brilliant novel describes the post-apocalyptic condition after a nuclear holocaust as a father and his son journey toward the sea for the winter. ... Read more

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This is nonfiction commentary. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Novels by Cormac Mccarthy, Plays by Cormac Mccarthy, Blood Meridian, the Road, No Country for Old Men, All the Pretty Horses, Suttree, the Crossing, Child of God, Cities of the Plain, the Orchard Keeper, the Sunset Limited, Outer Dark, the Stonemason. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt:All the Pretty Horses All the Pretty Horses is a novel by U.S. author Cormac McCarthy published in 1992. Its romanticism (in contrast to the bleakness of McCarthy's earlier work) brought the writer much public attention. The novel was a bestseller and won the U.S. National Book Award as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award . It is also the first of McCarthy's "Border Trilogy ."The book was adapted into a 2000 film with the same name, All the Pretty Horses , starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz , and directed by Billy Bob Thornton .Plot summary The novel tells of John Grady Cole, a sixteen year old cowboy who grew up on his grandfather's ranch in San Angelo West Texas . The story begins in 1949, soon after the death of John Grady's grandfather, when Grady learns that the ranch is to be sold. Faced with the prospect of moving into town, Grady instead chooses to leave, persuading his best friend, Lacey Rawlins, to accompany him. Traveling by horseback, the pair travel Southward into Mexico , where they hope to find work as cowboys.Shortly before they cross the Mexican border, they encounter a young man, who says he is named Jimmy Blevins and seems to be aged about thirteen, but claims to be older. Blevins' origins and the authenticity of his name are never quite clarified. Blevins rides a huge bay horse that is far too fine a specimen to be the property of a runaway boy, but Blevins insists it is his. As they travel south, Blevins' horse and pistol are found and t... ... Read more

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The opening section of The Crossing, book two of the Border Trilogy, features perhaps the most perfectly realized storytelling of Cormac McCarthy's celebrated career. Like All the Pretty Horses, this volume opens with a teenager's decision to slip away from his family's ranch into Mexico. In this case, the boy is Billy Parham, and the catalyst for his trip is a wolf he and his father have trapped, but that Billy finds himself unwilling to shoot. His plan is to set the animal loose down south instead.This is a McCarthy novel, not Old Yeller, and so Billy's trek inevitably becomes more ominous than sweet. It boasts some chilling meditations on the simple ferocity McCarthy sees as necessary for all creatures who aim to continue living. But Billy is McCarthy's most loving--and therefore damageable--character, and his story has its own haunted melancholy.Billy eventually returns to his ranch. Then, finding himself and his world changed, he returns to Mexico with his younger brother, and the book begins meandering. Though full of hypnotically barren landscapes and McCarthy's trademark western-gothic imagery (like the soldier who sucks eyes from sockets), these latter stages become tedious at times, thanks partly to the female characters, who exist solely as ghosts to haunt the men.But that opening is glorious, and the whole book finally transcends its shortcomings to achieve a grim and poignant grandeur. --Glen Hirshberg--This text refers to the Paperback edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A breakthrough collection of essays, now expanded to 2 vol.
Every once in a while, I revisit McCarthy's world, then peruse this collection again, establishing a sort of kinship with the minds herein:Edwin Arnold's "The Mosaic of Cormac McCarthy's Fiction," Rick Wallach's take on Judge Holden, Richard Marius's recollections of Suttree's haunts as seen through the window of McCarthy's fiction.Once again I read Peter Josyph's "Blood Music: Reading Blood Meridian," and am awake to the significance of the novel.

This collection encludes sparkling essays on McCarthy's entire body of work by Dianne C. Luce, Nancy Kreml, Linda Townley Woodson, Nell Sullivan, William Prather, D. S. Butterworth, Wade Hall, Tim Parrish, John Lang, Gary M. Ciuba, William C. Spencer, Natalie Grant, Brian Evenson, Wade Hall, and others. ... Read more

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Near the end of her life, when she was most candid, Mary McCarthy granted Carol Brightman 18 unrestricted interviews. Based on these, as well as unprecedented access to McCarthy's letters and papers, this biography reveals the essential McCarthy. Illustrations.Amazon.com Review
Brightman's massive biography of MaryMcCarthy passionately and responsibly chronicles the manyincarnations of "the first lady of letters." There's a lotto tell: McCarthy married four times, entertained many lovers,co-founded the Partisan Review, opposed World War II and penned16 novels, several memoirs and hundreds of letters, articles, essaysand reviews during her 79 years. Brightman richly details McCarthy'sascension from a battered foster child to a celebrated member of theNew York literary and intellectual elite. For McCarthy, Brightmanwrites, language was "an instrument of conquest ... a mediumfor the refinement of perception." Writing Dangerously wona 1992 National BookCritics Circle Award. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A Beauty Peeled
Coming of age in the sixties, no women appealed to me more than Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt, both of whom I read, listened to, and met.Arendt's was always the mind I wanted to emulate, a mentor, and my mind was putty in her words.But Mary McCarthy was like a flame, and we were her moths.She raged against the Vietnam war in ways much less convincing than Bernard Fall or even I.F. Stone, but with an eloquent, almost treasonous passion, a self-righteousness that one could not ignore.

I did not know, until I read this biography, and then Brightman's edition of their correspondence, that they were the closest of friends. Biography which reaches in and reveals the essence of the person in all her complexity is well nigh impossible unless you are a Boswell to Johnson or a Craft to Stravinsky.Carol Brightman has taken her brilliant intellect and matched Mary McCarthy's (and Boswell's) in this tour de force, certainly one of the finest biographies written anywhere, anytime.McCarthy obliges Brightman with all possible source material.In her fiction, her essays, her autobiographical musings, her interviews, Mary McCarthy revealed all.She wrote everything, about everything, about herself in many ways. In her relationship with one of her husbands, for example, another great intellectual skywriter, Edmund Wilson, you see all of her, her self-doubts and climbing of the New York intellectual social ladder, her sexuality and coldness, her tenderness and betrayal, her passion and conformity, in short, her humanity. Caught in her own many expressions of fantasy and fact by a mind that sees all connections, McCarthy is peeled like an onion by Brightman for all to see.We love her, we are pained by her vanity and ambition, we are fascinated by her journey, overwhelmed by her intellect and ultimately disappointed by her failure to move as deeply as her gifts could have taken her, so caught up is she in being an intellectual peacock.Brightman uses this material with such force that the biography is riveting, a book impossible to close.Certainly it is one of the greatest pieces of non-fiction and the best biography I have ever read.

Like walking thru mud
I bought this book because it was the selection in a monthly reading group for which I belong. I also bought it because I am a huge fan of Mary McCarthy and her straight-forward, no-apologies style of writing. However, I was deeply disappointed in this book.

To be honest, I never got past the first chapter. I just couldn't. Carol Brightman may be a brilliant biographer according to some, but to me she is akin to a Literature Professor with far too much time on her hands. She attempts to intellectualize a woman who lived by one credo: honesty in all things, no matter how ugly it is. Brightman uses heavy language and scholarly processes that bog the reader down and make it impossible to love a brilliant woman like Mary McCarthy.

If you want to know about Mary McCarthy skip this biography and instead, go read one of Mary's many books and enjoy.

Writing Dangerously Well
What a book! What a life! I've always been fascinated by Mary McCarthy, and have read much of her work. This biography enhances McCarthy's work by highlighting specific passages and relating them to McCarthy's life, whichshows a true commitment not just to McCarthy, the person, but to McCarthy,the artist. The text is well-written but also objective and filled withintricate details that truly illuminate the author's subject. If only allbiographies could read this way: engaging, astute, insightful, and smart.Bravo! ... Read more