Category: Cormac McCarthy

Links: Gathering Dust

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ann Patchett, Cormac McCarthy, John Jeter, Tobias Wolff, Vladimir Nabokov, Yiyun Li

Ann Patchett figures nobody’s read her 1994 novel, Taft.

Cormac McCarthy has won the PEN/Saul Bellow award for lifetime achievement, which should make Michael J. Fox happy.


John Jeter, author of The Plunder Room, explains why breaking into publishing is a little like his day job of running a music club.

Don’t start an interview with Tobias Wolff by asking about writing process.

Identity Theory’s James Warner avoids a similar kerfuffle in his interview with Yiyun Li, by simply asking what questions she prefers to avoid. This, for once, elicits an interesting reply:

I don’t particularly like to be asked about my views of political situations, both current and historical. As a fiction writer, I believe that what needs to be said about any political situation can not be separated from my fiction, and I feel that I have said enough in my work.

(Though if you write a novel set during late stages of the Cultural Revolution—and The Vagrants is a great book—it’s hard to be surprised that somebody might ask for your thoughts on China today.)

Vladimir Nabokov once wrote down some impressions on the critics who contributed to an issue of TriQuarterly commemorating his 70th birthday—with high praise for scholar Alfred Appel Jr., who died last Sunday. (via Sam Jones)

Independent bookstores around the country are being decimated. Except the ones in Martha’s Vineyard.

Screwing the System With Tao Lin and Binky Urban

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Cormac McCarthy, Tao Lin

In preparation for a panel on fiction writing/blogging/the death of the publishing industry/the death of newspaper book reviews that I’m participating in this Saturday, I’m trying to gather as many different perspectives on the current state of the publishing industry as I can. It’s not my bailiwick, but Twitter has been great at pointing me in a few interesting directions (@sarahw, @RonHogan, and @R_Nash being just three of many especially helpful people there worth following). Everybody agrees that the current situation is destructive, but it’s interesting to see the optimism of younger writers with little to lose set against the handwringing of the old guard that’s losing plenty.

In an interview with the Urban Elitist, Tao Lin discusses how he’s successfully financed his forthcoming novel by selling six $2,000 shares in it. Lin is somewhat infamous for his hustling for attention; I haven’t read a word of his fiction, so I have no clue if it’s worth that kind of investment. But going the Tao Lin route, however attention grabbing, still means lots of mac and cheese, at least for a while:

I have had part-time jobs almost continuously since college (I am 25), I think, except for maybe one year when I shoplifted batteries and Moleskine journals to sell on eBay. I stopped working at my last part-time job last August when I sold 60% of the royalties to my next novel, RICHARD YATES (Melville House, 2010), for $12,000. Since then my money (other than the $12,000) has come from selling pre-orders and lifetime subscriptions to books that a press I started called Muumuu House is publishing; Christmas and Chinese New Year’s money from my parents and brother; and selling drawings, drafts of things, and various “piles of shit” from my room on eBay.

Still, he’s hopeful: “I feel that within 2-4 years I will have steady cash flow from royalties from my books, foreign sales of my books, foreign royalties from my books, and other writing-related things,” he writes. Keeping authors going until steady cash flow arrives is also much on the mind of agent Amanda “Binky” Urban, who works with a host of A-list fiction writers. In an interview with Haaretz, Urban—who was in Israel as one of her clients, Haruki Murakami, picked up the Jerusalem Prize—argues that agents like herself, along with major houses, played critical roles in bringing Cormac McCarthy and Richard Ford to wider audiences. Her biggest fear in the midst of the reshaping of the publishing industry is that younger fiction writers no longer get the time to find a foothold:

“So fewer books will be published, and those whom we call midlist writers will no longer get published. The major writers will keep publishing, debut books will always be published, and the ones in the middle will have a problem…. The question is really how you keep authors alive until they break through and garner a large readership. That’s what I stay awake at night and worry about.”

It’s a legitimate concern, especially if a writer doesn’t have the temperament to perform all the duties that a publishing house traditionally has—it’s certainly hard to see the reclusive Cormac McCarthy starting out by going the Tao Lin route. The risk, perhaps, is that the fiction writers who survive this transformation are the ones who do the best job at self-promotion. Even McCarthy now has to give in a little, as he did by appearing on Oprah. Urban explains:

“I told him that before he says no, an Oprah Book Club pick means sales of between 750,000 and 1.2 million copies.” There was a long pause, and McCarthy replied that he knows he owes a lot of people, and maybe he should consider it. She asked him whom he owed, and he replied that he owed her and his publisher (Knopf). “I said, well don’t do that for us, and he said no, I think I should.”

The Killer Inside We

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Cormac McCarthy

In Esquire, Stephen Marche neatly connects our current obsession with violence to the bloodiness of Cormac McCarthy‘s novels. Marche’s evidence mainly sticks to Grand Theft Auto and mixed martial arts, but no matter, it’s still a good excuse to get a good quote in:

I hear my mother asking, “Why must our paradises be so violent?” Cormac McCarthy has an answer. From “Blood Meridian,” McCarthy’s masterpiece: “War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. . . . That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.” We can choose to sublimate violence through sports or confront it through fiction or turn it into comedy through video games. Violence remains. Always.

Taking a tone that’s a little less up-in-arms, my Washington City Paper colleague Brent Burton wrote a fine piece a while back about metal musicians’ embrace of McCarthy’s corpus:

When asked why McCarthy makes such a strong impression on headbangers—especially those who eschew vocals—Dahlquist suggests that imagery might be just as important as structure. “If I get something in my head,” he says, “maybe someone else will, as well.” Dylan Carlson, the man behind drone-metal act Earth, a band that once featured Kurt Cobain, would no doubt agree. Sidelined for years by drugs—O’Malley claims Carlson “cheated death,” just like a character in a McCarthy novel—Carlson reemerged in late 2005 with the all-instrumental Hex: Or Printing in the Infernal Method, an album based on—you guessed it—Blood Meridian. “[T]his book was the strongest invocation of the real American West I had ever encountered outside of a straight historical text,” Carlson said in an interview with British webzine Metal Chaos.

Roundup: Bait and Switch

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Cormac McCarthy, Gore Vidal, Herman Melville, Joe Meno, Lionel Shriver, Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson

(If you’re arriving here from the Readerville Journal, welcome. If you’re not arriving here from the Readerville Journal: The folks at that venerable site have been nice enough to dub this site its Blog of the Week.)

Frank Wilson‘s Books, Inq. points to a review of Lionel Shriver‘s The Post-Birthday World, an exemplar of very divisive novels. (Wilson’s taken this up before regarding Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road.) It was one of my favorite novels of last year; my review for Kirkus is floating somewhere on the Barnes & Noble review page.

Coudal Partners, a Chicago-based marketing firm, has put out its latest edition of Field-Tested Books, in which various writers contribute short essays about their experiences reading outside of the usual contexts of libraries, living rooms, and public transit. Bless Joe Meno‘s essay on Winesburg, Ohio, which I blogged about at Allvoices.

Mark Twain‘s home in Hartford, Conn., is in deep trouble; a visitors’ center wound up costing double what was anticipated and energy costs are way up. I’d suggest putting on a short play and charging customers a ton for it, but maybe that’s a little too glib. Seriously: Donate here.

Superman is 70.

Guy Sorman, writing in City Journal, enthuses about the Amazon Kindle. Walking in Central Park one day, he convinced his wife that she needed to read Herman Melville‘s Billy Budd, right now, and uploaded it to his Kindle: “I typed “Billy Budd” on the keyboard. It took five seconds to complete the wireless download and cost me approximately $6, debited from my Amazon account.” Had Sorman talked to me, I could’ve saved him six bucks, but I will concede that the Kindle is preferable if you’re insisting your spouse read something outside at that very moment.

I knew that Gore Vidal was bitter at how he’s been treated by the New York Times over the years, but yeesh:

What do you think is your own best novel? I don’t answer questions like that. Ever. And you ought not to ask them.

Well, it was a great pleasure talking to you. I doubt that.

The Secret History

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Audrey Niffenegger, Cormac McCarthy, Daniel Alarcón, Daniel Mason, Michael Chabon, Philip Roth

Gawker’s science-fiction blog, io9, has a chart-based study of sci-fi trends in mainstream literary novels. Charlie Jane Anders proposes three types of novels—“alternate history,” “time warp,” and “post-apocalyptic”—which means The Road, The Time-Traveler’s Wife, The Plot Against America, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and more are all fair game for discussion. I don’t think that the resulting chart really argues for a one-to-one relationship between current events and related fiction, but it’s an interesting idea to put out there. It’s certainly true that we got a lot of novels about broken-down Latin American countries in 2007 (Lost City Radio, A Far Country, and The Ministry of Special Cases, to name three), and those books certainly felt like responses to the United States’ political predicaments; add a category for “dystopia” and you may have something here. Anyway, Anders writes:

And then was a boom in post-apocalyptic fiction in more recent years, with three huge classics of the genre hitting in 2006. In particular, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has become the poster-child for the literary-authors-going-speculative trend. These books coincided with the Indian Ocean Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and a worsening Iraq conflict. But there’s been a lull in the post-apocalyptic genre since then as well.

Better English Through the Apocalyptic Novel

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Cormac McCarthy, Thomas McGuane

Voice of America Special English, which is designed to help listeners improve their command of the language, has a feature on Thomas McGuane and Cormac McCarthy. I like the idea of using either of them as literacy-improving devices–The Road, in certain ways, seems clear and simple and irony-free enough to do the job very well.

The transcript of the piece includes this bit:

Thomas McGuane recently spoke at a literature event held by the Pen Faulkner organization in Washington, D.C. He praised the group for inviting writers to speak from all areas of the United States. Then he read two short stories. He also talked about what it was like to make movies. He talked about working with the actors Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson for a movie he wrote called “Missouri Breaks.” He said that when he worked on movies in the nineteen seventies, the industry was very different from what it is today.

I was there, and McGuane also talked about what it was like to get 3 a.m. phone calls from a fucked-up Steve McQueen. But maybe that sort of thing is only for advanced readers.

Vice’s Fiction Issue

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Cormac McCarthy, Gary Fisketjon, Jim Shepard, Mary Gaitskill, Nick Tosches, Raymond Carver, Richard Price, Robert Coover

There’s lots of great stuff in Vice‘s second fiction issue–pieces by Richard Price, Mary Gaitskill, Robert Coover, Jim Shepard, Nick Tosches, and more–but I keyed in on this interview with editor Gary Fisketjon, who’s worked with Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, and more. All I can say to this bit is that I’m trying…:

Is there a temperament of a good editor?

I’ve known all sorts, but I should think the best would prove to be patient, understanding, careful, honest, and forthright rather than falsely flattering or disingenuous, celebratory, certainly, and sympathetic as well about all the trying circumstances all writers face nearly all the time. We’re all in this together, but only because writers have enabled us to be part of it.

News and Notes

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Cormac McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Richard Stern

Ten things that make Cormac McCarthy special

A speculative graphic novel about the war in Iraq, circa 2011

Richard Stern on Norman Mailer:

Yes, this greatly talented man, who could tell you where the grocer bought his suits and what radio programs he listened to, who knew why the Cape Canaveral launchings brought out every motor tinkerer within 500 miles, who knew why Jack Kennedy’s hauling his injured shipmate to safety as he did (teeth gripped on the man’s belt) revealed his ferocity, this brilliant reporter of the world’s stuff, had a depth of innocence he’d grown to dislike almost as much as he disliked and disowned the handsome Jewish boy swaddled in his herringbone suit on the back cover of “The Naked and the Dead.”

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry

Cormac McCarthy has sold his archives, including the draft of an unfinished novel, to the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University-San Marcos for $2 million. The SWC has an interesting assortment of arcana, as this CBC story notes in its last graf:

Also housed in the collection are the production archives of the Lonesome Dove miniseries and the animated TV show King of the Hill as well as the archives of writers such as Sam Shepard.

It’s also home to the Willie Nelson Collection.