Cormac McCarthy

The story or Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community there - a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters - he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity.

"Pass Christian, Mississippi, 1980: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips up the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from a Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot's flight bag, the plane's black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that...

"Stella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence. 1972, Black River Falls, Wisconsin: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her...

The acclaimed first novel from one of America's most celebrated novelists, the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road

Set is a remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, it is the story of a young boy and a bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father. The boy, John Wesley Rattner, and the outlaw, Marion Sylder—together with Rattner's

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Based on incidents that took place in the southwestern United States and Mexico around 1850, this novel chronicles the crimes of a band of desperados, with a particular focus on one, "the kid," a boy of fourteen. An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place...

In Graniteville, South Carolina, two families shelter their lives in the shadows of the great cotton mill: the wealthy Greggs, owners of the mill and scions of the local society; and the working-class McEvoys, who tend the gardens and work the plant floor. Robert McEvoy is forced to have his leg amputated during an incident which is rumored to have been caused by the son of the mill's founder. When Robert bitterly leaves Graniteville and returns two...

Ever since the publication of his first essay collection, The Broken Estate, in 1999, James Wood has been widely regarded as a leading literary critic of the English-speaking world. His essays on canonical writers (Gustav Flaubert, Herman Melville), recent legends (Don DeLillo, Marilynne Robinson) and significant contemporaries (Zadie Smith, Elena Ferrante) have established a standard for informed and incisive appreciation, composed in a distinctive...