Cormac McCarthy Books: Recommendations From His Editor

The Crossing builds on the incredible successes of All the Pretty Horses. McCarthy has heightened his style even further with this book and the pages become almost hypnotic. A third of the way through The Crossing he positively destroys the reader, but pick yourself up off the floor and keep going. The Crossing is a truly stunning follow-up.

And now, all together! Cities of the Plain brings together All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing in thrilling fashion. You can read this one alone, without having read either of the previous, but why would you do that when it’s so pleasurable to come to this book with the understanding of McCarthy’s true intent?

With No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy stepped away from the literary Western and delivered a straight, hard-boiled, fast-paced, streamlined Texas crime novel. Read it before you watch the Coen brothers’ hugely entertaining adaptation.

Dazzling and cinematic, Blood Meridian is also McCarthy’s most violent novel, one which showcases the author’s extraordinary abilities to give the reader screaming nightmares. The book is brutal, but there is nothing senseless about his use of cruelty. It is a study of evil and our relationship to this darkness in our own humanity.

The book that inspired an entire genre, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the NBCC, then a major motion picture. Chances are that if you’ve made it to this page, you are one of the millions and millions of readers who have already experienced The Road!   

When Suttree was published, in 1979, McCarthy had a marvelous reputation and a modest sales track. He was “a writer’s writer,” “the best unknown novelist in America,” poised for discovery. This haunting novel, McCarthy’s fourth, showcases the hallmarks of his work: his gift for dialogue, startling violence, hypnotic, rhythmic writing that builds into a story of what it truly means to be human.

The Passenger is 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. 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.

Stella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence. 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.