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Poe by Harry Clarke.
Happy birthday Edgar Allan Poe, born two hundred years ago today. I nearly missed this anniversary after a busy weekend. Rather than add to the mountain of praise for the writer, I thought I’d list some favourites among the numerous Poe-derived works in different media.
Illustrated books
For me the Harry Clarke edition of [...]

Continuing from yesterday’s post, these nameless characters were sketches for a proposed comic strip that writer Jamie Delano and I were planning in the mid-Nineties. We had a feeling that the long-neglected pirate genre was due for a revival and talked about a revisionist take on buccaneering which would dispense with the Robert Newton antics [...]

left: Vintage International (US), cover design by Susan Mitchell (1993).
right: Picador (UK) reprint (2008).
After the Oscars success of No Country for Old Men it’s understandable that Cormac McCarthy’s publishers would want to reprint all his works. His books still appear under the Picador imprint in the UK and they’ve been reissued recently in [...]

Cormac McCarthy’s appearance on Oprah’s Book Club—his first television appearance ever—was screened last week. You can watch it online for free on her site although you need to register first. The interview is presented in chunks and only lasts for about twenty minutes but it was worthwhile for all that, even if it is chopped [...]

Still in pursuit of a Cormac McCarthy obsession I picked up a copy of the (American) Vintage International paperback of Blood Meridian this week, almost solely for the cover. As it turns out it’s also an easier book to read than the UK edition, less tightly bound although the body text in both looks as [...]

The road to hell
Cormac McCarthy’s vision of a post-apocalyptic America in The Road is terrifying, but also beautiful and tender, says Alan Warner.
Saturday, November 4, 2006
The Guardian
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
256pp, Picador, £16.99
Shorn of history and context, Cormac McCarthy’s other nine novels could be cast as rungs, with The Road as a pinnacle. This [...]

Cormac McCarthy’s venomous fiction
Richard B. Woodward
The New York Times, April 19, 1992

“YOU KNOW ABOUT MOJAVE RATTLESNAKES?” Cormac McCarthy asks. The question has come up over lunch in Mesilla, N.M., because the hermitic author, who may be the best unknown novelist in America, wants to steer conversation away from himself, and he seems to [...]