Cities of the Plain ( Read more... )

UK Amazon has an untitled McCarthy book listed as due out late next year.

Reading as much McCarthy as I've been is a mixed experience. There's a tinge of the Flannery problem, where the better you understand him the less you want to - I think part of the appeal of The Road is that he's created a world where you and he are sure you agree for once - a problem made simultaneously easier and harder to take by his own ( Read more... )

Two passages I posted earlier, separately, (and near as I can tell the respective culminations of these two authors) now strike me as closer than I suspected:

Emerson:

Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and ( Read more... )

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Sunset Limited to be an HBO movie, directed by Tommy Lee Jones, acted by Jones and Samuel L. Jackson! Hard to even imagine what that one's like performed. On the page it's even more of a direct assault than his very "hey, quit it" last two novels proper.

I really, really liked Jones' Three Deaths of Melquiades Estrada, though it got his daughter ( Read more... )

HB: Well, we have four living writers in America who have, in one way or another, touched what I would call the sublime. They are McCarthy, of course, with Blood Meridian; Philip Roth, particularly with two extraordinary novels, the very savage Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral, which I mentioned before; Don DeLillo’s Underworld, which is a ( Read more... )

Lugones has written that in Cordoba, before magazines came in, he had many times seen a playing card used as a picture and nailed to the wall in gauchos' shacks. The four of copas, with its small lion and two towers, was particularly coveted. (from Borges' "Autobiographical Essay" of 1970 ( Read more... )

1. Blood Meridian's antecedents include what? Obviously Moby Dick. I'd say "Young Goodman Brown" and "My Kinsman Major Molineux" are also structural sources, and presumably Aguirre. Banville adds Dante and Homer, Bloom would say Shakespeare and maybe Milton. The Trial seems to me to be at least as important. Once I mentioned the book seemed like a ( Read more... )

I'd unaccountably never read Socrates' second oration in Phaedrus till now. Past gratitude and amazement and love and disturbance and quickened pulse and the conviction I'll be going back to this within days, I have these observations ( Read more... )