All the Pretty Horses (39 page)

Authors: Cormac McCarthy

“McCarthy puts most other American writers to shame.”
—The New York Times Book Review

THE ORCHARD KEEPER

Set in a small, remote community in rural Tennessee between the two world wars, this novel tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy’s father. Together with Rattner’s Uncle Ather, they enact a drama that seems born of the land itself.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72872-6 (trade)
978-0-307-76250-4 (eBook)

OUTER DARK

Outer Dark
is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set in an unspecified place in Appalachia around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother’s child, a boy, whom he leaves in the woods and tells her the baby died of natural causes. Discovering her brother’s lie, she sets forth alone to find her son.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72873-3 (trade)
978-0-307-76249-8 (eBook)

CHILD OF GOD

Child of God
is a taut, chilling novel that plumbs the depths of human degradation. Falsely accused of rape, Lester Ballard—a violent, dispossessed man who haunts the hill country of East Tennessee—is released from jail and allowed to roam at will, preying on the population with his strange lusts.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72874-0 (trade)
978-0-307-76248-1 (eBook)

SUTTREE

This is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege to live in a houseboat on the Tennessee River. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community—a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters—he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-73632-5 (trade)
978-0-307-76247-4 (eBook)

THE STONEMASON

The setting is Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1970s. The Telfairs are stonemasons and have been for generations. Ben Telfair has given up his education to apprentice himself to his grandfather, Papaw. Out of the love that binds these two men and the gulf that separates them from the Telfairs who have forsaken—or dishonored—the family trade, McCarthy has crafted a drama that bears all the hallmarks of his great fiction.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76280-5

BLOOD MERIDIAN

This is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America’s westward expansion. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72875-7 (trade)
978-0-307-76252-8 (eBook)

ALL THE PRETTY HORSES

All the Pretty Horses
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.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-74439-9 (trade)
978-0-307-48130-6 (eBook)

THE CROSSING

In the late 1930s, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family’s ranch. Instead of killing it, he takes it back to the mountains of Mexico. With that crossing, he begins an arduous and dreamlike journey into a country where men meet like ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat-lightning.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76084-9 (trade)
978-0-307-76246-7 (eBook)

CITIES OF THE PLAIN

It is 1952 and John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are working as ranch hands in New Mexico. Their life is made up of trail drives and horse auctions and stories told by campfire light, a life they value because they know it is about to change forever.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-74719-2 (trade)
978-0-307-77752-2 (eBook)

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, the setting of his famed Border Trilogy. A good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by dead man. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law can contain.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70667-7 (trade)
978-0-307-39053-0 (eBook)

THE SUNSET LIMITED

A startling encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life or death decision must be made. In that small apartment, “Black” and “White,” as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history, mining the origins of two fundamentally opposing world-views. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the men—though he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is desperate to deny it. Their aim is no less than this: to discover the meaning of life.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-27836-4 (trade)
978-0-307-49812-0 (eBook)

THE ROAD

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-38789-9 (trade)
978-0-307-26745-0 (eBook)

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