Recommendations from our site
“It is his opus, his great work. Blood Meridian is really the masterpiece, it’s just such a rich mixture of history and metaphysics.” Read more...
The Best Cormac McCarthy Books
Stacey Peebles, Literary Scholar
“A difficult read that I savour for its wondrous prose and stark vision of humanity.” Read more...
Esi Edugyan on Books That Influenced Her
Esi Edugyan, Novelist
“For me, this is one of the three great novels of the last century…. It’s wild in so many senses. It’s wild in the astonishing indifference of the desert landscape to human practice – McCarthy evokes this more purely than any other writer I know. It’s wild in the sense that humans are animals in it. I mean that both in the colloquial sense, that they behave ferally, but also that they are creatural, driven almost entirely by base instinct – avarice, lust, greed, revenge. It’s an astonishingly, ethically undifferentiated and austere drama which gets played out against an astonishingly undifferentiated and austere landscape.” Read more...
Robert Macfarlane, Literary Scholar
“It’s possibly the greatest American novel of the past 25 years. It is unique. Blood Meridian is amazing, because it’s so rigid in its outlook, so committed to its vision, that it does not care about the conflict of the reader who, if sane, has to be uncomfortable. It is the most violent book I have read. This is a book about a bunch of scalp-hunters in Southwestern American territories before the Civil War, who were hired to hunt, kill, and scalp Native Americans. It follows them as they ride on and roam around killing Indians, committing horrible massacres. It is quite literally apocalyptic. There’s a stretch of about 60 pages, when the only subject is the group, and the most common sentence is ‘They rode on’.” Read more...
Aleksandar Hemon on Man’s Inhumanity to Man
Aleksandar Hemon, Novelist
