Cormac McCarthy - Complete Novels, Stories and Plays (16 books+)

* Cormac McCarthy - Complete Novels, Stories and Plays (16 books+)

This is an updated version of my 2020 collection.

CORMAC McCARTHY (1933 — 2023) was an American novelist, playwright, short-story writer, and screenwriter who was widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary authors.  His novels about wayward characters in the rural American South and Southwest were noted for their dark violence, dense prose, and stylistic complexity.  Described in a 2007 interview as "the most celebrated recluse in American literature since J.D. Salinger", and hailed by The Guardian as "America's great poetic visionary", McCarthy died at his home in Santa Fe, NM, on June 13, 2023.

His debut novel, THE ORCHARD KEEPER (1965), is about a Tennessee man and his two mentors.  Social outcasts highlight such novels as OUTER DARK (1968), about two incestuous siblings; CHILD OF GOD (1974), about a lonely man’s descent into depravity; and SUTTREE (1979), about a man who overcomes his fixation on death.  BLOOD MERIDIAN (1985), a violent frontier tale, initially received a lukewarm critical and commercial reception but is now regarded as his masterpiece.  It tells the story of 14-year-old boy who joins a gang of outlaws hunting Native Americans along the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1840s.  The group is headed by a malevolent figure called the Judge, who leads the gang through a series of staggeringly amoral actions, through which McCarthy explores the nature of good and evil.

McCarthy achieved popular fame with ALL THE PRETTY HORSES (1992), winner of the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award.  It is the first volume of "The Border Trilogy" and is the coming-of-age story of John Grady Cole, a Texan who travels to Mexico.  The second instalment, THE CROSSING (1994), set before and during World War II, follows the picaresque adventures of the brothers Billy and Boyd Parham and centres around three round-trip passages that Billy makes between southwestern New Mexico and Mexico.  The trilogy concludes with CITIES OF THE PLAIN (1998), which interweaves the lives of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham through their employment on a ranch in New Mexico.

McCarthy’s later works include NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2005), a bloody modern western that opens with a drug deal gone bad, and the post-apocalyptic THE ROAD (2006), which won the Pulitzer Prize and relates a father and son's struggle to survive after a disaster has all but destroyed the United States.  In addition, he has written two plays — THE STONEMASON (2001), about the tribulations of a Southern black family, and THE SUNSET LIMITED (2006), suggestively subtitled "a novel in dramatic form" — and two screenplays: THE GARDENER'S SON (1996), based on a strange 1876 murder in Graniteville, South Carolina, and THE COUNSELOR (2013), a drama about drug trafficking.

McCarthy befriended Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate in physics and co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a multidisciplinary research center devoted to the study of complex systems.  He made SFI his second home, exchanging ideas with scientists and scholars and writing on his Olivetti manual typewriter.  He wrote SFI's Operating Principles, and also became its Lifetime Trustee and Senior Fellow of the Institute.

McCarthy published his first piece of nonfiction, "The Kekulé Problem" , in the science magazine Nautilus in 2017.  The essay meditates on the nature of the unconscious mind and the origins of language, and evinces the influence of his work at the SFI.  His last two novels, THE PASSENGER (2022) and STELLA MARIS (2022), also delved into the ideas of mathematics, physics, and analytical themes he explored with his SFI colleagues.

Finally, I include a fascinating video of McCarthy in conversation with his friend David Krakauer at SFI in December 2017.  It is a wide-ranging and animated discussion in which the two discuss everything from the philosophy of mathematics to quantum mechanics to the human unconscious.  It reveals dimensions to McCarthy that most readers will not have seen before and is not to be missed.


The following works are in ePub format unless otherwise noted:

== NOVELS ==

* All the Pretty Horses [Border Trilogy I] (Vintage, 1993)
* Blood Meridian (Random House, 1992)
* Child of God (Vintage, 1993)
* Cities of the Plain [Border Trilogy III] (Knopf, 1998)
* The Crossing [Border Trilogy II] (Vintage, 1995)
* No Country for Old Men (Vintage, 2006) — PDF + ePub
* The Orchard Keeper (Vintage, 1993)
* Outer Dark (Vintage, 1993)
* The Passenger (Knopf, 2022)
* The Road (Knopf, 2006) — PDF + ePub
* Stella Maris (Knopf, 2022)
* Suttree (Vintage, 1992)

== SHORT STORIES ==

* A Drowning Incident (The Phoenix, March 1960) — PDF
* The Dark Waters (Sewanee Review, Spring 1965) — PDF
* Scenes of the Crime (New Yorker, 10 June 2013) — PDF
* Wake for Susan (The Phoenix, October 1959) — PDF

== PLAYS & SCREENPLAYS ==

* The Counselor (Vintage, 2013)
* The Gardener's Son (Ecco, 2015)
* The Stonemason (Ecco, 1994 / Vintage, 1995) — PDF + ePub
* The Sunset Limited (Vintage, 2006)

== ESSAYS ==

* The Kekulé Problem (Nautilus, March-April 2017) — PDF

== INTERVIEWS ==

* A Conversation with the Coen Brothers (TIME, 29 Oct. 2007) — PDF
* Connecting Science and Art [audio] (NPR, 8 April 2011) — MP3
* Cormac Country (Vanity Fair, August 2005) — PDF
* Cormac McCarthy's Apocalypse (Rolling Stone, 27 Dec. 2007) — PDF
* Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction (NYT Mag., 19 April 1992) — PDF
* In Conversation with David Krakauer (SFI, December 2017) — MP4
* Interviews in Tennessee and Kentucky, 1968–1980 (2022) — PDF


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