New Releases by Cormac McCarthy

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The first of a two-volume masterpiece, The Passenger series, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road • The story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God. A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR "Blends the rowdy humor of some of McCarthy’s early novels with the parched tone of his more apocalyptic later work." —The New York Times Stella Maris, the second volume in The Passenger series, is available now. 1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from the Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit—by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul. Traversing the American South, from the garrulous barrooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The second volume of The Passenger series, from The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road • An intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence. "The richest and strongest work of McCarthy’s career…An achievement greater than Blood Meridian…or…The Road.” —The Atlantic 1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.

In Cities of the Plain, two men marked by the boyhood adventures of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing now stand together, between their vivid pasts and uncertain futures, to confront a country changing beyond recognition. In the fall of 1952, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are cowboys on a New Mexico ranch encroached upon from the north by the military. On the southern horizon are the mountains of Mexico, where one of the men is drawn again and again, in this story of friendships and passion, to a love as dangerous as it is inevitable. ''In a lovely and terrible landscape of natural beauty and impending loss we find John Grady; a young cowboy of the old school, trusted by men and horses, and a fragile young woman, whose salvation becomes his obsession . . . McCarthy makes the sweeping plains a miracle'' Scotsman ''This haunting, deeply felt novel completes one of the literary masterworks of the 1990s'' Daily Telegraph ''The completed trilogy emerges as a landmark in American literature'' GuardianThis edition is part of the Picador Collection, a new list of the best in contemporary literature published in Picador''s 50th Anniversary year. McCarthy''s eagerly anticipated new novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, will be published by Picador in October 2022.

Set along the US-Mexcio border of the 1940s, Cormac McCarthy''s legendary Border Trilogy continues with The Crossing, a coming-of-age western set parallel to the events of All the Pretty Horses. ''McCarthy speaks to us in the thrilling, apocalyptic tones of an Old Testament prophet'' - Sunday Telegraph Sixteen-year-old Billy Parham and his younger brother Boyd are fascinated by an elusive wolf that has been marauding his family''s property. Billy captures the animal but, rather than kill it, sets out impulsively for the mountains of Mexico to return it to from where it came. On his return, he will find himself - and his world - irrevocably changed. His innocence lost at a cruel price, the desolate beauty of the border will beckon once again . . . ''The Crossing is like a river in full spate: beautiful and dangerous'' - The Times ''Nominally Westerns, these books are too entropic and philosophical to fit within the limits of the genre. They summon the ghosts of history, and haunt the gaps between justice and reality'' - Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room The Crossing is the second volume in the Border Trilogy. It is preceded by All the Pretty Horses and followed by Cities of the Plain. Praise for Cormac McCarthy ''McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute'' - Anne Enright, author of The Green Road and The Wren, The Wren ''His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power'' - Stephen King, author of The Shining and the Dark Tower series ''[I]n presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, [McCarthy] showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence'' - Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.

The first screenplay by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road tells the saga of rival families in post-Civil War South Carolina. Set in Graniteville, South Carolina, The Gardener’s Son is a tale of privilege and hardship, animosity and vengeance. The McEvoys, a poor family beset by misfortune, must work in the cotton mill owned by the Greggs. But when Robert McEvoy loses his leg in an accident—rumored to have been caused by his nemesis, James Gregg—the bitter young man deserts his job and family. Two years later, Robert returns. His mother is dying, and his father, the mill’s gardener, is confined indoors working the factory line. These intertwined events stoke the slow burning rage McEvoy has long carried, a fury that erupts in a terrible act of violence that ultimately consumes the Gregg family and his own. Made into an acclaimed film broadcast on PBS in 1976, The Gardener’s Son received two Emmy Award nominations and was screened at the Berlin and Edinburgh Film Festivals.

From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road—in this screenplay of the major motion picture, the Counselor makes a risky entrée into the drug trade, on the eve of becoming a married man, and gambles that the consequences won’t catch up to him. Along the gritty terrain of the Texas–Mexico border, a respected and recently engaged lawyer throws his stakes into a cocaine trade worth millions. His hope is that it will be a one-time deal and that, afterward, he can settle into life with his beloved fiancée. But instead, the Counselor finds himself mired in a brutal and dangerous game—one that threatens to destroy everything and everyone he loves. Deft, shocking, and unforgettable, McCarthy is at his finest in this gripping tale about risk, consequence, and the treacherous balance between the two. Look for Cormac McCarthy''s latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road • In this taut, chilling story, Lester Ballard—a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape—haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance. "Like the novelists he admires-Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner-Cormac McCarthy has created an imaginative oeuvre greater and deeper than any single book. Such writers wrestle with the gods themselves." —Washington Post Look for Cormac McCarthy''s latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America''s westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy''s latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road, here 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. Look for Cormac McCarthy''s latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The first volume in the Border Trilogy, from the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. Look for Cormac McCarthy''s latest novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road • 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 brother''s 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. Look for Cormac McCarthy''s latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

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. Look for Cormac McCarthy''s latest novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road • 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. Deft, spare, and full of artful tension, The Sunset Limited is a beautifully crafted, consistently thought-provoking, and deceptively intimate work by one of the most insightful writers of our time. Look for Cormac McCarthy''s latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

An internationally acclaimed artist whose work has been honored with inclusion in both the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial, James Drake has explored political, social, and universal themes through the media of sculpture, video, installation, photography, and drawing. James Drake, the first monograph devoted to the artist, surveys thirty-five years of Drake’s work up to 2007. Many of the works reproduced in James Drake reflect the artist’s preoccupation with borders. Some have to do with the political border between the United States and Mexico and the inherent social and psychological tensions of people living in its extreme and unique environment. Other works explore the internal boundaries that people experience as a result of attitudes, prejudices, power, control, and arrogance. Jimmy Santiago Baca’s narrative poem Huitzilopochtli, a personal response to Drake’s work, provides a verbal counterpart to the artist’s theme of border-crossing. Another prominent subject in Drake’s work is the relationship of people and animals—in particular, the animality that always lurks in human behavior. In his essay “Between Animality and Man,” critic Steven Henry Madoff traces this subject through Drake’s work and shows how Drake uses it to contrast the forces of intellect and instinct, light and darkness. Interspersed among the color plates are quotations from writers as varied as Cormac McCarthy and Dante. Also accompanying the plates and essays is an introduction by Bruce W. Ferguson, a nationally known art curator, educator, and critic, that places Drake’s work in an art historical context. Lists of James Drake’s works, exhibitions, public collections, and awards, as well as a bibliography of works about Drake, complete this first retrospective of the oeuvre of this major, socially concerned artist, who always “tries to make work as exciting, powerful, and thought-provoking as possible.”

A Estrada representa uma mudança surpreendente na ficção de Cormac McCarthy e talvez seja sua obra-prima. Eleito um dos melhores livros do século XXI pelo The New York Times. Num futuro não muito distante, o planeta encontra-se totalmente devastado. As cidades foram transformadas em ruínas e pó, as florestas se transformaram em cinzas, os céus ficaram turvos com a fuligem e os mares se tornaram estéreis. Os poucos sobreviventes vagam em bandos. Um homem e seu filho não possuem praticamente nada. Apenas uns cobertores puídos, um carrinho de compras com poucos alimentos e um revólver com algumas balas, para se defender de grupos de assassinos. Estão em farrapos e com os rostos cobertos por panos para se proteger da fuligem que preenche o ar e recobre a paisagem. Eles buscam a salvação e tentam fugir do frio, sem saber, no entanto, o que encontrarão no final da viagem. Essa jornada é a única coisa que pode mantê-los unidos, que pode lhes dar um pouco de força para continuar a sobreviver. A Estrada representa uma mudança surpreendente na ficção de Cormac McCarthy e talvez seja sua obra-prima. Mais que um relato apocalíptico, é uma comovente história sobre amadurecimento, esperança e sobre as profundas relações entre um pai e seu filho.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son''s fight to survive, this "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy''s stature as a living master. It''s gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle). • From the bestselling author of The Passenger 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. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other''s world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation. Look for Cormac McCarthy''s latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

"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." ---English publisher.

When he stumbles upon a bloody massacre, a cache of heroin, and more than two million in cash during a hunting trip, Llewelyn Moss removes the money, a decision that draws him and his young wife into the middle of a violent confrontation.

From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road comes a taut, expansively imagined drama about four generations of an American family. 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, a man who knows that "true masonry is not held together by cement but...by the warp of the world." 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, Cormac McCarthy has crafted a drama that bears all the hallmarks of his great fiction: precise observation of the physical world; language that has the bite of common speech and the force of Biblical prose; and a breathtaking command of the art of storytelling. Look for Cormac McCarthy''s latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The second volume of the award-winning Border Trilogy—From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road—fulfills the promise of All the Pretty Horses and at the same time give us a work that is darker and more visionary, a novel with the unstoppable momentum of a classic western and the elegaic power of a lost American myth. In the late 1930s, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family''s ranch. But instead of killing it, he decides to take it back to the mountains of Mexico. With that crossing, he begins an arduous and often dreamlike journey into a country where men meet ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat-lightning—a world where there is no order "save that which death has put there." An essential novel by any measure, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops, and starts the heart and mind at once. Look for Cormac McCarthy''s latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

The acclaimed first novel from one of America''s most celebrated novelists, the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road • Set is a remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, it is the story of a young boy and a bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy''s father. The boy, John Wesley Rattner, and the outlaw, Marion Sylder–together with Rattner''s Uncle Ather, who belongs to a former age in his communion with nature and his stoic independence–enact a drama that seems born of the land itself. All three are heroes of an intense and compelling celebration of values lost to time and industrialization. Look for Cormac McCarthy''s latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.