{ feuilleton }

Cormac McCarthy wins lifetime achievement award | The PEN/Saul Bellow award.

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 [...]

Penguin is really coming up with the goods these days, living up to their reputation as a house with high standards of cover design, unlike Picador and the shabby way they treated Cormac McCarthy recently.
Ian Fleming’s Bond novels are the latest to receive a makeover with some fabulous art from illustrator Michael Gillette. 2008 is [...]

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 [...]

A shot rang out…
| Cormac McCarthy is “simply the greatest living novelist writing in English” says Jason Cowley. Absolutely.

Previous posts about book covers or cover design.

• Nabokov book covers

• Netherlands decorated books

• March of the Penguins

• Science fiction and fantasy covers

• The art of Ed Emshwiller, 1925–1990

• The King in Yellow

• Samuel Beckett and Russell Mills

• Penguin science fiction

• Ma Petite Ville

• Groovy book covers

• Bugger Boy

• Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick

• Alan Aldridge: [...]

CM, JC & EC photographed by Eric Ogden.
First an Oprah interview, now a feature in TIME; the famously reclusive Cormac McCarthy is almost becoming gregarious. The TIME piece is only a short sit-down between CM and the Coen Brothers which serves to promote the forthcoming film of No Country for Old Men but it’s still [...]

A very young-looking Cormac McCarthy (he was 35) in a New York Times book ad from 1968. There are more ads from the paper’s recent past here.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Cormac McCarthy book covers

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 [...]

One of the posters for the new Coen Brothers’ film has finally surfaced and the design is pretty similar to the original book jacket by Chip Kidd (later spoiled with poor type layout in the UK edition). The book cover looks better but we’ll probably see some variations on the poster design anyway. I’m reading [...]

So I finished The Road finally, relishing its ash-strewn bleakness at my own sluggish pace. It’s worth noting (since I missed the event) that McCarthy’s novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for best fiction earlier this month, and deservedly so, I’m sure. As if that wasn’t enough, we’re also awaiting the bizarre spectacle of the [...]

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 [...]