Cormac McCarthy Books In Order

The Border Trilogy Books In Publication Order

  1. All the Pretty Horses (1992)
  2. The Crossing (1994)
  3. Cities of the Plain (1998)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Orchard Keeper (1965)
  2. Outer Dark (1968)
  3. Child of God (1973)
  4. Suttree (1979)
  5. Blood Meridian (1985)
  6. No Country for Old Men (2005)
  7. The Road (2006)

Standalone Plays In Publication Order

  1. The Stonemason (1994)
  2. The Gardener’s Son (1996)
  3. The Sunset Limited (2006)
  4. The Counselor (2013)

M. Georgia Hegarty Dunkerley Contemporary Art Books In Publication Order

  1. James Drake (With: James Drake,Jimmy Santiago Baca) (2008)

The Border Trilogy Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Standalone Plays Book Covers

M. Georgia Hegarty Dunkerley Contemporary Art Book Covers

Cormac McCarthy Books Overview

All the Pretty Horses

This is Volume One of the ‘Border Trilogy’. ‘A uniquely brilliant book…
told in language as subtly beautiful as its desert setting. One of the most important pieces of American writing of our time’ Stephen Amidon, ‘Sunday Times’. John Grady Cole is the last bewildered survivor of long generations of Texas ranchers. Finding himself cut off from the only life he has ever wanted, he sets out for Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. Befriending a third boy on the way, they find a country beyond their imagining: barren and beautiful, rugged yet cruelly civilized; a place where dreams are paid for in blood. ‘All the Pretty Horses‘ is an acknowledged masterpiece and a grand love story: a novel about childhood passing, along with innocence and a vanished American age. Steeped in the wisdom that comes only from loss, it is a magnificent parable of responsibility, revenge and survival. ‘A darkly shining work…
executed with consummate skill and much subtlety the effect is magnificent’ John Banville, ‘Observer’. ‘An exhilarating, exceptional novel’ ‘Spectator’. ‘In a single stride it takes McCarthy to the forefront of contemporary American fiction. All the Pretty Horses is indisputably a masterpiece’ ‘Financial Times’.

The Crossing

Following All the Pretty Horses in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy is a novel whose force of language is matched only by its breadth of experience and depth of thought. In the bootheel of New Mexico hard on the frontier, Billy and Boyd Parham are just boys in the years before the Second World War, but on the cusp of unimaginable events. First comes a trespassing Indian and the dream of wolves running wild amongst the cattle lately brought onto the plain by settlers this when all the wisdom of trappers has disappeared along with the trappers themselves. And so Billy sets forth at the age of sixteen on an unwitting journey into the souls of boys and animals and men. Having trapped a she wolf he would restore to the mountains of Mexico, he is long gone and returns to find everything he left behind transformed utterly in his absence. Except his kid brother, Boyd, with whom he strikes out yet again to reclaim what is theirs thus crossing into ‘that antique gaze from whence there could be no way back forever.’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. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Cities of the Plain

2 cassettes / 3 hoursRead by Brad PittAbridgment approved by the authorIn this final volume of The Border Trilogy, two men marked by the boyhood adventures of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing now stand together, in the still point between their vivid pasts and uncertain futures, to confront a country changing or already changed beyond recognition. In the fall of 1952, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham nine years apart in age, yet with a kinship greater than perhaps they know are cowboys on a New Mexico ranch encroached upon from the north, at Alamogordo, by the military. To the south, always on the horizon are the mountains of Mexico, looming over El Paso, Ciudad Ju rez and all the Cities of the Plain. Bound by nature to horses and cattle and range, these two discover that ranchlife domesticity is compromised, for them and the men they work with, by a geometry of loss afflicting old and young alike, those who have survived it and anyone about to try. And what draws one of them across the border again and again, what would bind ‘those disparate but fragile worlds,’ is a girl seized by ill fortune, and a love as dangerous as it is inevitable. This story of friendship and passion is enfolded in a narrative replete with character and place and event a blind musician, a marauding pack of dogs, curio shops and ancient petroglyphs, a precocious shoe shine boy, trail drives from the century before, midnight on the highway and with landforms and wildlife and horses and men, most of all men and the women they love and mourn, men and their persistence and memories and dreams. With the terrible beauty of Cities of the Plain with its magisterial prose, humor both wry and out right, fierce conviction and unwavering humanity Cormac McCarthy has completed a landmark of our literature and times, an epic that reaches from tales of the old west, the world past, into the new millennium, the world to come.

The Orchard Keeper

Set in a small, remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, ‘The Orchard Keeper‘ is an early classic from one of America’s finest and most celebrated authors. It tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy’s father. Cormac McCarthy’s debut novel is a magnificent evocation of an American landscape, and of a lost American time. ‘The feeling for the land and seasons is so intense as to be part of the story and there are scenes one will never forget…
A complicated and evocative exposition of the transience of life’ ‘Harper’s’. ‘A true American original’ ‘Newsweek’.

Outer Dark

By the author of the critically acclaimed ‘Border Trilogy’, ‘Outer Dark‘ is a novel at once mythic and starkly evocative, set in an unspecified place in Appalachia sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother’s child, a boy; the brother 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. ‘McCarthy is a master stylist, perhaps without equal in American letters…
In his hands, everything is done with consummate skill’ ‘Village Voice’. ‘McCarthy has made the fabulous real, the ordinary mysterious’ ‘New York Times’. ‘A profound parable that ultimately speaks to any society in any time’ ‘Time’.

Child of God

By the author of the critically acclaimed ‘Border Trilogy’, ‘Child of God‘ is a taut, chilling novel that plumbs the depths of human degradation. Lester Ballard, a violent, solitary and introverted young backwoodsman dispossessed on his ancestral land, is released from jail and allowed to haunt the hill country of East Tennessee, preying on the population with his strange lusts. McCarthy transforms commonplace brushes with humanity in homesteads, stores and in the woods into stunning scenes of the comic and the grotesque, and as the story hurtles toward its unforgettable conclusion, depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humour, and characteristic lyrical brilliance. ‘Demands its reader’s attention from the opening sentence’ ‘Newsweek’. ‘A reading experience so impressive, so ‘new’, so clearly well made that it seems almost to defy the easy aesthetic categories…
Accomplished in rare, spare, precise yet poetic prose’ ‘New Republic’. ‘His prose, unfailingly beautiful and exact, carries us into a dreamworld of astonishing and violent revelation. It is a frightening, entrancing world, which we must finally recognize as our own’ Tobias Wolff. ‘McCarthy is a powerful and talented writer, able to elicit compassion for his protagonist however terrible his action’ ‘Sunday Times’.

Suttree

This compelling novel has as its protagonist Cornelius Suttree, living alone and in exile in a disintegrating houseboat on the wrong side of the Tennessee River close by Knoxville. He stays at the edge of an outcast community inhabited by eccentrics, criminals and the poverty stricken. Rising above the physical and human squalor around him, his detachment and wry humour enable him to survive dereliction and destitution with dignity. ”Suttree‘ contains a humour that is Faulknerian in its gentle wryness, and a freakish imaginative flair reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor’ ‘Times Literary Supplement’. ”Suttree‘ marks McCarthy’s closest approach to autobiography and is probably the funniest and most unbearably sad of his books’ ‘Stanley Booth’.

Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian‘ is 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, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen year old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. ‘McCarthy’s achievement is to establish a new mythology which is as potent and vivid as that of the movies, yet one which has absolutely the opposite effect…
He is a great writer’ ‘Independent’. ‘I have rarely encountered anything as powerful, as unsettling, or as memorable as Blood Meridian
A nightmare odyssey’ ‘Evening Standard’. ‘His masterpiece…
The book reads like a conflation of the ‘Inferno’, ‘The Iliad’ and ‘Moby Dick’. I can only declare that ‘Blood Meridian‘ is unlike anything I have read in recent years, and seems to me an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement’ John Banville.

No Country for Old Men

Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot dead, a load of hero*in, and more than $2 million in cash. Taking the money out, he knows, will change everything. But only after two more men are murdered does a victim’s burning car lead Sheriff Bell to the carnage out in the desert, and he soon realizes that Moss and his young wife are in desperate need of protection. One party in the failed transaction hires an ex Special Forces officer to defend his interests against a mesmerizing freelancer, while on either side are men accustomed to spectacular violence and mayhem. The pursuit stretches along and across the border, each participant seemingly determined to answer what one asks another: How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life? ‘This is a monster of a book. Cormac McCarthy achieves monumental results by a kind of drip by drip process of ruthless simplicity. It will leave you panting and awestruck’ Sam Shepard. ‘Imagine the Coen brothers doing a self conscious riff on Sam Peckinpah and filming a fast, violent story about a stone cold killer, a small town sheriff and an average Joe who stumbles across a leather case filled with more than $2 million in hot drug money’ ‘International Herald Tribune’. ‘A profoundly disturbing and gorgeously rendered novel…
No Country for Old Men‘ is a page turner’ ‘Washington Post’.

The Road

NATIONAL BESTSELLERPULITZER PRIZE WINNERNational Book Critic’s Circle Award FinalistA New York Times Notable BookOne of the Best Books of the YearThe Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Denver Post, The Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times, New York, People, Rocky Mountain News, Time, The Village Voice, The Washington PostThe searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.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. From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Stonemason

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 thoughtmyself 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’dcleave 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.

The Gardener’s Son

In the Spring of 1975 the film director Richard Pearce approached Cormac McCarthy with the idea of writing a screenplay. Though already a widely acclaimed novelist, the author of such modern classics as The Orchard Keeper and Child of God, McCarthy had never before written a screenplay. Using nothing more than a few photographs in the footnotes to a 1928 biography of a famous pre Civil War industrialist as inspiration, the author and Pearce together roamed the mill towns of the South researching their subject. One year later McCarthy finished The Gardener’s Son,a taut, riveting drama of impotence, rage, and ultimately violence spanning two generations of mill owners and workers, fathers and sons, during the rise and fall of one of America’s most bizarre utopian industrial experiments. Produced as a two hour film and broadcast on PBS in 1976, The Gardener’s Son recieved two Emmy Award nominations and was shown at the Berlin and Edinburgh Film Festivals. This is the first appearance of the film script in book form. Set in Graniteville, South Carolina, The Gardener’s Son is the tale of two families: the Greggs, a wealthy family that owns and operates the local cotton mill, and the McEvoys, a family of mill workers beset by misfortune. The action opens as Robert McEvoy, a young mill worker, is having his leg amputated the limb mangled in an accident rumored to have been caused by James Gregg, son of the mill’s founder. McEvoy, crippled and isolated, grows into a man with a ‘troubled heart’; consumed by bitterness and anger, he deserts both his job and his family. Returning two years later at the news of his mother’s terminal illness, Robert McEvoy arrives only to confront the grave diggers preparing her final resting place. His father, the mill’s gardener, is now working on the factory line, the gardens forgotten. These proceedings stoke the slow burning rage McEvoy carries within him, a fury that ultimately consumes both the McEvoys and the Greggs.

The Sunset Limited

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 diametrically opposing world views, they begin a dialectic redolent of the best of Beckett. 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 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 deeply intimate work by one of the most insightful writers of our time. ”The Sunset Limited‘ grips from the very first page’ ‘Financial Times’. ‘The author at his best, meditating on life, suffering and religion’ ‘Shortlist’. ‘It’s remarkable that Cormac McCarthy could revive the antique genre of the philosophical dialogue as convincingly as he does here. His prose bites’ ‘Evening Standard’.

James Drake (With: James Drake,Jimmy Santiago Baca)

An internationally acclaimed artist whose work has been honored with inclusion in both the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial, James Drake has explored political, social, and universal themes through the media of sculpture, video, installation, photography, and drawing. James Drake, the first monograph devoted to the artist, surveys thirty five years of Drake’s work up to 2007.

Many of the works reproduced in James Drake reflect the artist’s preoccupation with borders. Some have to do with the political border between the United States and Mexico and the inherent social and psychological tensions of people living in its extreme and unique environment. Other works explore the internal boundaries that people experience as a result of attitudes, prejudices, power, control, and arrogance. Jimmy Santiago Baca’s narrative poem Huitzilopochtli, a personal response to Drake’s work, provides a verbal counterpart to the artist’s theme of border crossing.

Another prominent subject in Drake’s work is the relationship of people and animals in particular, the animality that always lurks in human behavior. In his essay ‘Between Animality and Man,’ critic Steven Henry Madoff traces this subject through Drake’s work and shows how Drake uses it to contrast the forces of intellect and instinct, light and darkness.

Interspersed among the color plates are quotations from writers as varied as Cormac McCarthy and Dante. Also accompanying the plates and essays is an introduction by Bruce W. Ferguson, a nationally known art curator, educator, and critic, that places Drake’s work in an art historical context. Lists of James Drake’s works, exhibitions, public collections, and awards, as well as a bibliography of works about Drake, complete this first retrospective of the oeuvre of this major, socially concerned artist, who always ‘tries to make work as exciting, powerful, and thought provoking as possible.’

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