UNITED STATES AUTHOR · FICTION · DRAMA
Cormac McCarthy
Also known as: Cormac Mccarthy, Mccarthy Cormac
Cormac McCarthy (born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr.) is an American writer who has written twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, spanning the Western and postapocalyptic genres. He is known for his graphic depictions of violence and his unique writing style, recognizable by a sparse use of punctuation and attribution. McCarthy is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary American writers.
I WAS born under the Blue Ridge, and under that side which is blue in the evening light, in a wild land of game and forest and rushing waters.
— from The Crossing
Most acclaimed
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. So Billy sets forth at the age of sixteen on an unwitting journey into the souls of boys, 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." What they find instead, is an extraordinary panoply of fiestas and circuses, dogs, horses and hawks, pilgrims and revolutionaries, grand haciendas and forlorn cantinas, bandits, gypsies and roving tribes, a young girl alone on the road, a mystery in the mountain wilds, and a myth in the making. And in this wider world they fight a war as rageful as the one neither, in the end, will join up for back home. One brother finds his destiny, while the other arrives only at his fate. An essential novel by any measure, and the transfixing middle passage of Cormac McCarthy's ongoing trilogy, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops,and starts the heart and mind at once.
Stella Maris
»Wenn du deine Stimme verlierst, bleiben nur deine Taten, um für die zu kämpfen, die du liebst.« Das Leben der zwanzigjährigen Serena wird auf den Kopf gestellt, als ihre Mutter ihr eröffnet, sie müsse einen fremden Mann heiraten. Geschockt lässt sie ihr Elternhaus zurück, um am Meer Zuflucht zu finden. Als eine wunderschöne Frau aus den Fluten steigt und ihr einen Handel vorschlägt, zögert sie nicht und willigt ein. Ihr Wunsch nach Freiheit wird erfüllt und kurze Zeit später erwacht Serena im Körper einer Meerjungfrau unter dem Meeresspiegel. Während der jüngste Prinz des Unterwasserreiches sie in seine Welt entführt, muss sie feststellen, dass Aramis ihre Gefühle mehr durcheinander bringt, als sie vermutet hat. Der Machtkampf, der in diesem Reich seit Langem zwischen Meermenschen und Sirenen herrscht, fordert allerdings bald Opfer und Serena gerät zwischen die Fronten. Fortan muss sie nicht nur um ihre Liebe kämpfen, sondern auch um ihr Leben. Und das einzig durch Taten, denn Serenas Herzenswunsch hatte einen hohen Preis: ihre Stimme.
The Road
Cormac McCarthy's tenth novel, The Road, is his most harrowing yet deeply personal work. Some unnamed catastrophe has scourged the world to a burnt-out cinder, inhabited by the last remnants of mankind and a very few surviving dogs and fungi. The sky is perpetually shrouded by dust and toxic particulates; the seasons are merely varied intensities of cold and dampness. Bands of cannibals roam the roads and inhabit what few dwellings remain intact in the woods. Through this nightmarish residue of America a haggard father and his young son attempt to flee the oncoming Appalachian winter and head towards the southern coast along carefully chosen back roads. Mummified corpses are their only benign companions, sitting in doorways and automobiles, variously impaled or displayed on pikes and tables and in cake bells, or they rise in frozen poses of horror and agony out of congealed asphalt. The boy and his father hope to avoid the marauders, reach a milder climate, and perhaps locate some remnants of civilization still worthy of that name. They possess only what they can scavenge to eat, and the rags they wear and the heat of their own bodies are all the shelter they have. A pistol with only a few bullets is their only defense besides flight. Before them the father pushes a shopping cart filled with blankets, cans of food and a few other assets, like jars of lamp oil or gasoline siphoned from the tanks of abandoned vehicles—the cart is equipped with a bicycle mirror so that they will not be surprised from behind. Through encounters with other survivors brutal, desperate or pathetic, the father and son are both hardened and sustained by their will, their hard-won survivalist savvy, and most of all by their love for each other. They struggle over mountains, navigate perilous roads and forests reduced to ash and cinders, endure killing cold and freezing rainfall. Passing through charred ghost towns and ransacking abandoned markets for meager provisions, the pair battle to remain hopeful. They seek the most rudimentary sort of salvation. However, in The Road, such redemption as might be permitted by their circumstances depends on the boy’s ability to sustain his own instincts for compassion and empathy in opposition to his father’s insistence upon their mutual self-interest and survival at all physical and moral costs. The Road was the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Literature.