Cormac McCarthy, perhaps America’s greatest living fiction writer, won the Pulitzer Prize for his acclaimed novel The Road, the story of a father and son living in a post-apocalyptic world completely barren of hope. I haven’t read it but I understand that it’s like nothing you’ve ever read before; that, like his other novels, the prose and the story is so relentless and ruthless and lovely that he leaves you paralyzed. I’ve never been able to quite articulate what it was like to read All the Pretty Horses and Blood Meridian, except the bumbling sense that they had absorbed me as much as I absorbed them.
I know the next novel I’ll be picking up. An excerpt:
He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.
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