Customer Reviews

Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (Southern Quarterly Series)

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This is an excellent update of an important and hard-to-find book. It is scholarly and yet very accessible and helpful to the lay McCarthy fan.

However, be warned the hardback edition for which they are charging 40 BUCKS is a very unattractive book with no dustjacket -- essentially the paperback with a black cloth library binding. I am hopeful this can be corrected or the price slashed. Amazon doesn't display the cover for this title because it would be simply a black rectangle -- shades of Spinal Tap.

Like most of the critical writing that is accruing about McCarthy's work these days, reading these essays invites the observation that academic commentary on great works of literature all too often appears as a perverse sort of alchemy, an attempt to tranform bronze into excrement. While merely vexatious for those familiar with McCarthy's work, these institutionally sanctioned forms of obfuscation, however well-meaning, are a tremendous dis-service to the uninitiated. McCarthy's ambition is biblical, ungodly; thus, his work is robustly defiant -- even scornful -- of contemporary professional exegesis.