Books by Cormac McCarthy

All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of the Borders Trilogy, tells of young John Grady Cole, the last of a long line of Texas ranchers. Across the border Mexico beckons; beautiful and desolate, rugged and cruelly civilized. With two companions, he sets off on an idyllic, sometimes comic adventure, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.

The first volume of A Border Trilogy (which will be published in successive years), All the Pretty Horses is a grand love story, an education in responsibility, Esquire.

An omnibus collection featuring the three volumes of the Border Trilogy--All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain--evokes the mythic splendor and majesty of America's Old West. Books available. Read by Brad Pitt.

Based on incidents that took place in the southwestern United States and Mexico around 1850, this novel chronicles the crimes of a band of desperados, with a particular focus on one outlaw, known as "the Kid," a boy of fourteen.

An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion. Based on historical events, it traces the fortunes of a fourteen-year-old boy who stumbles into a nightmarish world along the Texas-Mexico border.

A trio of novel--All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain--that chronicles the lives and fates of two young men coming of age in the American Southwest and Mexico are combined in a single volume.

Cormac McCarthy third novel, stained in the dark ink of Faulkner and Conrad, and set in rural Tennessee, tells the story of an unsavory loner named Lester Ballard, a murderer and necrophilic. As disturbing as these qualities are, what is perhaps even more unsettling is how McCarthy draws us into Ballard's mind, seeping us in his craven soul, and forcing us to see him with sympathy as another one of God's children. After his family farm is auctioned off, Lester lives in an abandoned shack, haunting the fringes of society like an animal, but, like Frankenstein's creature, his attempts at making human contact are rebuffed, until he finally descends into a maze of mountainous caves, a physical parallel to his brutal descent into violence and madness. Though the content of the story is horrifying, McCarthy's prose is lyrical, lapidary, and transcendent, creating an uncanny disharmony with the details of Lester's life.

In 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 Juárez 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.

This second volume of Cormac McCarthy's famed Border Trilogy is set in the 1940s and tells the story of 16-year-old Billy Parham and his obsessive quest to return to Mexico a pregnant she-wolf he has trapped. He leaves New Mexico, setting off on his own, and in the course of this perilous (and doomed) journey he becomes far older than his years. When Billy returns, he encounters a scene of violence and desolation: everything he left behind has been transformed. He strikes out again, this time with his younger brother, Boyd, into the unknown frontier. Boyd becomes a legendary folk hero, then disappears, and Billy's new quest is to find his lost brother. McCarthy has been compared to everyone from Hemingway to Faulkner. This fable-like tale of mythic quests and heroic despair takes on the issues of guilt and innocence, love and violence, and the power of fraternal bonds.

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 paragraphs 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 received 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.

Cormac McCarthy's first book in six years is about an unsavory loner named Lester Ballard. Lester is a murderer and a necrophiliac--and yet McCarthy succeeds in painting a sympathetic portrait, seeing him as a "child of God" like anyone else. Lester's brutal descent into violence and madness is horrifyingly described, but McCarthy's prose is as lyrical as ever, and the book ends on a note of redemption. The book (his third novel, published in 1974), is set, like many of his works, in his native eastern Tennessee. This is a Spanish-language verion of the text.

Presents a searing, post-apocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.

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. Movie tie-in.

Cormac McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN is an epic nightmare of a novel. Set in the 1850s on the Tex-Mex border, it is about a 14-year-old runaway--known only as "the kid"--who comes of age in a brutal culture. Joining up with a gang of Indian-killers, the kid learns to kill Apaches for bounty. Barely escaping with his life from a group bent on revenge, he takes up with a larger-than-life figure called Judge Holden, a truly vicious man who represents all that is evil in humanity. In the end, it's the kid vs. the judge: only one will survive. The kid's journey through a landscape fraught with violence and horror is a kind of satire of the traditional epic quest of the hero in literature, and an allegory of the transformation of the American west as it became increasingly despoiled by blood, greed, and its own fake heroic grandeur. This is a Spanish-language version of the text.

Stumbling upon a bloody massacre, a cache of heroin, and more than $2 million in cash during a hunting trip near the Rio Grande, Llewelynn Moss removes the money, a decision that draws him and his young wife into the middle of a violent confrontation in which their only hope of survival is local sheriff Ed Tom Bell.

In rural Tennessee--Cormac McCarthy's home ground--a boy named John Wesley Rattner, whose father has been murdered, teams up with Athel Ownby, an aged man who lives in harmony with the land, to resist the encroachment of the modern world. One of Ownby's peculiarities is the mysterious corpse he keeps in his garden--a corpse that turns out to be meaningful for more than one character in the story. THE ORCHARD KEEPER, McCarthy's first novel (published in 1965), is steeped in the dialect, idioms, and landscapes of Tennessee. It won a Faulkner Award and launched his career as a major voice in American letters.

Outer Dark is 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 brothers 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.

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. 250,000 first printing.

Cormac McCarthy's bleak vision of the American landscape has always had a cataclysmic undertone, so it comes as no surprise that THE ROAD is actually set in a post-apocalyptic world of ash and bitter cold where cannibalistic marauders roam the countryside. In this dire place, a man and his son travel towards the sea armed only with a revolver and two bullets. Amid this desolation, a tin of canned pears is thing of wonder, and a broken wheel on their shopping cart can mean the difference between life and death. Their love for each other is fierce, but the son fears that his father has, in his desperation, become as savage and brutal as the world around him. Cormac McCarthy writes with a searing white heat, his images and language strike deep in the reader, and his vision of humanity is inexorable and haunting.

Set in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1970s, The Stonemason is a multi-generational drama about black men struggling to maintain their dignity. The drama evokes the subtleties of Grecian tragedy with the mastery of character, plot, and pathos that distinguishes the acclaimed fiction of this recent National Book Award winner.

By the author of Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, Suttree is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community there--a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters--he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity.

The first volume in McCarthy's Border Trilogy, ALL THE PRETTY HORSES begins with the death of John Grady Cole's grandfather. John Grady, age 16, has lived with his grandfather for much of his life, and when the old man dies and the family home--a ranch in Texas--is sold, John Grady and his old friend Lacey Rawlins take off for Mexico, looking for a place in a world that seems increasingly hostile. Almost immediately, they encounter trouble, and the trip is studded with death, loss, violence, stolen horses, and thwarted love. By the time John Grady returns home--alone--he is irrevocably changed. This is a Spanish-language version of the text.