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“... Cormac McCarthy has offered us nightmares before. In Outer Dark (1968) he conjured a twisted version of the Nativity in which a child is conceived in incest, abandoned in the woods, sought for months by his mother, and eventually murdered in front of his father by a man who slits his throat. In Child of God (1973) McCarthy imagined a serial murderer and necrophiliac who abducts his unwitting victims mid-coitus from parked cars and drags them into an underground lair, where he lays them out on stone shelves for his nefarious pleasure ...”

“... In Cormac McCarthy’s latest novel, the young hero, imprisoned in a jail in Mexico and suffering harsh conditions, has a brilliant dream – a dream calling for some very earnest writing on the part of the author: That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain ... and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colours shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised ...”

“... personages,’ Alicia Western tells her psychiatrist in Stella Maris, the second of two novels by Cormac McCarthy published this autumn. The leader of these phantoms is called the Thalidomide Kid. He’s a bit over three feet tall (Alicia measured this by comparing their shadows), has a bald and scarred head and flippers for hands. ‘He looked like ...”

“... Cormac McCarthy comes to us with a tremendous reputation: not only the National Book Award but a critical chorus comparing him to Melville, Shakespeare, Conrad, Faulkner, Dostoevsky. There have also been voices crying hokum, but not many. The Crossing is McCarthy’s seventh novel, and you have only to open one of them to see what has set everyone reeling ...”

“... lead man’ and reduces Eli’s pay. This is because he hasn’t read enough Faulkner, or Cormac McCarthy, and doesn’t recognise the sanity that lies in bumbling. Initially it seems they are going to kill a man called Kermit Warm, very well acted by Riz Ahmed as a man who looks more helpless than he is. He is said to have stolen money from the ...”

“... The Things They Carried: practically every classic war novel in the American canon, along with Cormac McCarthy and, for good measure, the Iliad. It was shortlisted for the National Book Award, and has won various other prizes and accolades. A lot of this, I suspect, was based on respect for the writer’s experiences rather than the words on the ...”

“... this aporia, if she must be his eyes and he must be her voice?While I was reading Greek Lessons, Cormac McCarthy died. All at once the violence of his novels, particularly Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men, ceased to be controversial and became the very litmus test of genius. McCarthy claimed that ...”

“... the recent successes of ‘literary’ writers who have used the genre (notably Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy), the Western still awaits its Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Kurt Vonnegut, or even its Georgette Heyer: that is, the writer capable of lifting its clichés into art. Elmore Leonard might have done it, had he not decided to switch to ...”

“... for rousing cadences and shapely phrases, so it’s brave of him to have a go at conjuring the Cormac McCarthy-style apocalypse that awaits us if insect numbers continue to plunge (‘Ah, how I miss chocolate. I have tried to explain how it tasted to my grandchildren, but of course it is impossible’). What he lacks in elegance he makes up for in ...”

“... anymore. Even so, as the technology takes its final bow there’s been quite a flurry of interest: Cormac McCarthy auctioning his Olivetti Lettera 32 for a quarter of a million bucks made big news. I was approached by Patek Phillipe to write about typewriters for an advertorial feature. I could see the synchrony of watches and typewriters: both ...”

“... The Gift of Stones his arm, but who could just as well have ridden out of the pages of a novel by Cormac McCarthy, or a film by Peckinpah. The Pesthouse is, if not exactly a Western, then a distorted reflection of one. Under attack from a group of mounted bandits, Franklin saves Margaret by pulling off her headscarf and revealing her hairless scalp. The ...”

“... dash and stumble, but it requires enormous reserves of synonyms. It takes Joseph Conrad or Cormac McCarthy to prolong monotonous misery in a satisfying manner. When the tone is frantic from the start, supplies are soon exhausted, and even the narrator seems to lose interest: ‘There were … all kinds of combustible moments between half-crazed ...”

“... on gender). Hemingway’s style, with its anti-aestheticising aesthetic, is still influential. Cormac McCarthy dispenses with the apostrophe in shortened forms like ‘doesnt’ and ‘wouldnt’, though the need for clarity requires him to keep it in ‘can’t’, with the result that the impression of imperative sparseness suffers, chafing so ...”

“... reality that overwhelms its origin. We’ve finally (post-National Book Award) got around to Cormac McCarthy, whose first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1966, but we continue to ignore William Eastlake, who worked (Go in Beauty and Portrait of an Artist with 26 Horses) a parallel seam with equal distinction. To be read, a player, a part ...”

“... applies to Nabokov; or, for that matter, to Bellow, Updike, Compton-Burnett, Iain Sinclair, Cormac McCarthy, Roth, Ozick, etc. (Lurking in Wood’s idea is the implication that modern critics and readers make too much of signature.) Nabokov’s signature is often both what initially attracts readers to his work, and what puts them off it, or causes ...”