New Releases by Cormac McCarthy

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The second volume of The Passenger series, from The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road • An intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence. "The richest and strongest work of McCarthy’s career…An achievement greater than Blood Meridian…or…The Road.” —The Atlantic 1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.

La storia di una salvezza impossibile. Un''opera di disperata bellezza e apicale bravura. Nel cuore di una fredda notte del 1980, Bobby Western indossa la sua muta da sommozzatore e si tuffa nelle nere profondità della baia del Mississippi. Laggiú scorge il profilo di un aereo con nove corpi in cabina, gli occhi vuoti e le braccia protese verso un gelido abbraccio. Che fine ha fatto il fantomatico decimo passeggero? Quali oscure macchinazioni cela la sua scomparsa? Dolente viandante del mondo da sempre braccato dalla perdita e dalla colpa, ora Bobby deve tornare a fuggire, inseguendo la libertà e il ricordo di una donna per sempre irraggiungibile. «Un romanzo capace di inchiodarci alla pagina come un thriller e allo stesso tempo di sollevare questioni fondamentali, facendoci interrogare sulla nostra natura, di piú: sulla nostra (in)capacità di comprendere il mistero stesso della vita». Giuseppe Culicchia, «tuttolibri - La Stampa» «L''inconscio è piú antico del linguaggio. Molto piú antico. È un concetto su cui Cormac McCarthy torna spesso. Il passeggero è un libro splendido, e a questo tipo di riflessione deve molto». Nicola Lagioia, «Lucy» «Un libro sugli amori che non si arrendono alla memoria. Un libro di McCarthy, e di Cormac, le due personalità narrative dell''autore che sfiatano una prosa calcificata nella terra e una ricerca di amore sospesa». Marco Missiroli, «la Lettura - Corriere della Sera»

L’apocalypse a eu lieu. Le monde est dévasté, couvert de cendres. Un père et son fils errent sur une route, poussant un caddie rempli d’objets hétéroclites et de vieilles couvertures. Ils sont sur leurs gardes car le danger peut surgir à tout moment. Ils affrontent la pluie, la neige, le froid. Et ce qui reste d’une humanité retournée à la barbarie. Cormac McCarthy raconte leur odyssée dans ce récit dépouillé à l’extrême. Prix Pulitzer 2007, La Route s’est vendu à plus de deux millions d’exemplaires aux États-Unis. « Héritier de la Bible et de Shakespeare, de Hawthorne et de Faulkner, archaïque, lyrique et visionnaire, sensible à la beauté du monde, McCarthy est hanté par la violence des hommes et la question du Mal. » Nathalie Crom, Télérama Traduit de l’anglais (États-Unis) par François Hirsch.

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The first of a two-volume masterpiece, The Passenger series, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road • The story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God. A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR "Blends the rowdy humor of some of McCarthy’s early novels with the parched tone of his more apocalyptic later work." —The New York Times Stella Maris, the second volume in The Passenger series, is available now. 1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from the Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit—by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul. Traversing the American South, from the garrulous barrooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.

En ung dreng stikker af hjemmefra og slutter sig til John Joel Glantons bande, der i midten af 1800-tallet jager krigsførende apacheindianere på grænsen mellem Texas og Mexico. Snart myrder de også fredelige indianere, mexicanske soldater, uskyldige civile og alle andre, der kommer i vejen. Hurtigt bliver drengen suget ind i en mareridtsagtig verden, hvor vold dominerer, og markedet for indianerskalpe blomstrer. I baggrunden truer den dæmoniske dommer Holden. Han har et barns uskyldige ansigt, ikke et hår på kroppen, en utæmmet tilbøjelighed til vold og en endeløs viden om den verden, han rider hærgende igennem. BLODETS MERIDIAN, Cormac McCarthys hovedværk, baserer sig på virkelige begivenheder under Amerikas ekspansion mod vest.

"En udsøgt litterær fornøjelse og en skræmmende oplevelse (...) Cormac McCarthy-begyndere kan og bør starte hér - hvis ellers de er indstillet på at få ødelagt deres nattesøvn med et mesterligt amerikansk mareridt." - Tonny Worm, Information En far og hans tiårige søn vandrer alene gennem et udbrændt Amerika. Intet rører sig, bortset fra asken i vinden. Det er så koldt, at sten flækker, og når sneen falder, er den grå. Deres mål er kysten, selv om de ikke aner, hvad der venter dem - om noget overhovedet. De har intet med sig, kun en pistol til at forsvare sig mod lovløse bander, det tøj, de har på, en indkøbsvogn med dåsemad - og hinanden. VEJEN er en intens historie om en nådesløs rejse. Den fremmaner en fremtid uden håb, hvor en far og hans søn udholder mareridtet i kraft af deres kærlighed til hinanden.

‘Wat een prachtig boek. Het knappe van McCarthy is dat hij veel dreiging tussen de regels door laat voelen [...]. Boven alles heeft De weg een geweldige stijl, pakkende personages en genoeg materiaal om een avond lang over te praten.’ – Ionica Smeets in de Volkskrant Nadat er een gloeiende vuurzee over het land is geraasd, doorkruisen een man en zijn zoontje het doodse Amerikaanse landschap. In deze met as bedekte, vergane wereld volgen zij de weg naar het zuiden. Het enige wat hen rest is te overleven in de snijdende kou, zonder elkaar te verliezen. Ze zijn alles voor elkaar. De weg is een bespiegeling over de dunne scheidslijn tussen beschaving en woestenij, en over de alomvattende en soms beangstigende liefde die een kind voor zijn ouders voelt. Een ijzingwekkend meesterwerk.

Brutally violent, Blood Meridian is the story of one teenage runaway in the nineteenth-century American South, as a sadistic gang unleashes its massacre across the desert land. It is the work that sealed Cormac McCarthy''s reputation as one of the twentieth century''s greatest writers. ‘[A] brilliant, uncompromising work of fiction – imagine if the authors of the King James Bible, their hands guided by Satan, wrote a western’ – The Times Through the hostile landscape of the Texas–Mexico border wanders the Kid, a fourteen year-old Tennessean who is quickly swept up in the relentless tide of blood. A group known as the Glanton gang hunt Indigenous Americans, collecting scalps as their bloody trophies. At the centre of this violence stands Judge Holden: a massive, hairless man, mysterious if not supernatural, erudite and cold-blooded. He is singularly extreme in his sadistic violence. But the apparent chaos is not without order – the Glanton gang, too, are stalked as prey. Read as both a brilliant subversion of the Western novel and a blazing example of that form, it is a powerful, mesmerizing and savagely beautiful novel – and one of the most important works in American fiction of the last century. ‘In Blood Meridian, McCarthy reaches the peak of his style: spare and ornate at once, repetitious but endlessly readable’ – Guardian Praise for Cormac McCarthy: ‘McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute’ – Anne Enright, author of The Green Road and The Wren, The Wren ''His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power'' – Stephen King, author of The Shining and the Dark Tower series ''[I]n presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, [McCarthy] showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence'' – Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.

From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road—in this screenplay of the major motion picture, the Counselor makes a risky entrée into the drug trade, on the eve of becoming a married man, and gambles that the consequences won’t catch up to him. Along the gritty terrain of the Texas–Mexico border, a respected and recently engaged lawyer throws his stakes into a cocaine trade worth millions. His hope is that it will be a one-time deal and that, afterward, he can settle into life with his beloved fiancée. But instead, the Counselor finds himself mired in a brutal and dangerous game—one that threatens to destroy everything and everyone he loves. Deft, shocking, and unforgettable, McCarthy is at his finest in this gripping tale about risk, consequence, and the treacherous balance between the two.

El guardián del vergel , la primera novela de Cormac McCarthy, autor de La carretera por la que ganó en 2007 el premio Pulitzer, es ya un clásico de la literatura estadounidense. Situada en una pequeña y remota comunidad rural de Tennessee en el período de entreguerras, nos habla de la vida de John Wesley Rattner, un muchacho, y de Marion Sylder, un vagabundo fuera de la ley que ha matado al padre del chico, aunque ninguno de los dos lo sabe. Ambos, junto a Ather, el tío de Rattner, protagonizarán un drama que parece nacer de las entrañas de la tierra. Reseña: «Una compleja y evocativa reflexión sobre la futilidad de la vida.» Harper''s

*Premio Pulitzer 2007 por La carretera* En la frontera es la segunda parte de la «Trilogía de la Frontera». Billy y Boyd, dos adolecentes de origen campesino, irán descubriendo las duras reglas del mundo de los adultos al tiempo que encuentran en la naturaleza el sentido heroico de sus vidas. Desde una extraña relación de afecto y complicidad con una loba acosada por los tramperos hasta el asesinato de sus padres a manos de unos cuarteros, Bily aprenderá que la belleza y la rapiña moral representan los límites inseparables de una misma aventura vital. Reseña: «Suspense el alma del lector y, al mismo tiempo, lo arrebata en su belleza. » El País

In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity.

Una impresionante e imaginativa fábula moral acerca de la naturaleza de la violencia y la justicia. Una novela épica sobre la violencia y la depravación que acompañaron a la expansión de América hacia el oeste, Meridiano de sangre subvierte espléndidamente las convenciones de la novela occidental y la mitología del “salvaje oeste”. Basada en acontecimientos históricos ocurridos en la frontera de Texas y México alrededor de 1850, traza las fortunas del Chico, un muchacho de Tennessee, que tropieza con el horrible mundo del grupo de Glanton, y su líder espiritual, el llamado juez Holden: un hombre calvo, albino, sin barba, sin pestañas, ni cejas; un hombre violento y cruel que apenas duerme y afirma que jamás morirá.

Ens trobem en ple segle XIX al bell mig de la zona fronterera que separa Mèxic dels Estats Units. Les autoritats mexicanes i de l''Estat de Texas organitzen una expedició paramilitar per eliminar el major nombre d''indis possible. És el que s''anomena El Grup Glanton, que té com a líder espiritual el jutge Holden, un home dur, violent i cruel que està convençut de la seva immortalitat. En un moment determinat els carnissers de Glanton decideixen aturar la matança per iniciar un nou extermini: la llei de la selva es comença a imposar. Enmig d''aquest malson, un noi de catorze anys es veurà obligat a enfrontar-se al món.

Esta novela "transcurre en la inmensidad del territorio norteamericano, un paisaje literalmente quemado por lo que parace haber sido un reciente holocausto nuclear. Un padre trata de salvar a su hijo emprendiendo un viaje con él. Rodeados de un paisaje baldío, amenazados por bandas de caníbales, empujando un carrito de la compra donde guardan sus escasas pertenencias, recorren los lugares donde el padre pasó una infancia recordada a veces en forma de breves bocetos del paraíso perdido, y avanzan hacia el sur, hacia el mar, huyendo de un frío ''capaz de romper las rocas.''"--Page 4 of cover.

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 50 BEST THRILLERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road, Blood Meridian, and All the Pretty Horses, this is the “profoundly disturbing and gorgeously rendered” novel (The Washington Post) that inspired the Academy Award®–winning film. “A narrative that rips along like hell on wheels [on] a stage as big as Texas.”—The New York Times Book Review The setting is the Texas–Mexico border. The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law—in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell—can contain. As Moss tries to evade his pursuers—in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives—McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines. No Country for Old Men is a triumph.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son’s fight to survive that “only adds to McCarthy’s stature as a living master. It’s gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful” (San Francisco Chronicle). One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

"A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don''t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food - and each other." ---English publisher.

From the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road—a startling encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life or death decision must be made. In that small apartment, “Black” and “White,” as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history, mining the origins of two fundamentally opposing world views. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the men–though he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is desperate to deny it. Their aim is no less than this: to discover the meaning of life. Deft, spare, and full of artful tension, The Sunset Limited is a beautifully crafted, consistently thought-provoking, and deceptively intimate work by one of the most insightful writers of our time. Look for Cormac McCarthy''s new novel, The Passenger, coming October ''22.

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.

The Stonemason is a profoundly moving drama set in Louisville, Kentucky in the 1970s, concerning several generations of a black family. McCarthy''s narrator, Ben, reveals a painful episode in his family''s history, grounding us at the same time in the beautiful dynamic between him and his grandfather, Papaw. Ben, Ben''s father, and Papaw are all stonemasons, but in descriptions of "the trade" we learn as much about this family''s capacity for love as we do about constructing sound foundations for houses, barns and bridges. Papaw''s knowledge about stonemasonry is analogous to his deep spiritual wisdom, and Ben recognizes both as he looks back on his apprenticeship in the "trade at which I thought myself a master and of which I stood in darkest ignorance. And as I came to know him ... As I came to know him ... Oh I could hardly believe my good fortune. I swore then I''d cleave to that old man like a bride. I swore he''d take nothing to his grave." Papaw''s son Big Ben and great-grandson Soldier do not respond as whole-heartedly to the old man''s wealth of knowledge and patient guidance and the tragedy of the story is largely rooted in this fact. Both of these characters have lost connection with the work of their hands and by association with the earth, their family, and themselves. They are profoundly dissatisfied. Of his father, Ben later wonders, "Why could he not see the worth of that which he had laid aside and the poverty of all he hungered for? Why could he not see that he too was blest?" The Stonemason reveals afresh the mastery of character, plot, pathos, and the poetic facility for language that distinguishes Cormac McCarthy''s fiction, and which recently earned him the National Book Award for his bestselling novel, All The Pretty Horses.

From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road • In this taut, chilling story, Lester Ballard—a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape—haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance. "Like the novelists he admires-Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner-Cormac McCarthy has created an imaginative oeuvre greater and deeper than any single book. Such writers wrestle with the gods themselves." —Washington Post

From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road • A novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother''s child, a boy; he leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother''s lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.

The acclaimed first novel from one of America''s most celebrated novelists, the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road • Set is a remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, it is the story of a young boy and a bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy''s father. The boy, John Wesley Rattner, and the outlaw, Marion Sylder–together with Rattner''s Uncle Ather, who belongs to a former age in his communion with nature and his stoic independence–enact a drama that seems born of the land itself. All three are heroes of an intense and compelling celebration of values lost to time and industrialization.

Num futuro não muito distante, o planeta encontra-se totalmente devastado. As cidades foram transformadas em ruínas e pó, as florestas se transformaram em cinzas, os céus ficaram turvos com a fuligem e os mares se tornaram estéreis. Os poucos sobreviventes vagam em bandos. Um homem e seu filho não possuem praticamente nada. Apenas uns cobertores puídos, um carrinho de compras com poucos alimentos e um revólver com algumas balas, para se defender de grupos de assassinos. Estão em farrapos e com os rostos cobertos por panos para se proteger da fuligem que preenche o ar e recobre a paisagem. Eles buscam a salvação e tentam fugir do frio, sem saber, no entanto, o que encontrarão no final da viagem. Essa jornada é a única coisa que pode mantê-los unidos, que pode lhes dar um pouco de força para continuar a sobreviver. A Estrada representa uma mudança surpreendente na ficção de Cormac McCarthy e talvez seja sua obra-prima. Mais que um relato apocalíptico, é uma comovente história sobre amadurecimento, esperança e sobre as profundas relações entre um pai e seu filho.