McCarthy Society Updates
The Passenger and Stella Maris: A Symposium
Creighton University
Omaha, NE
September 21-23, 2023
The Cormac McCarthy Society invites proposals on any aspect of McCarthy’s new novels for a special symposium to be held at Creighton University. Submit one-paragraph proposals to cormacmccarthysociety@gmail.com by June 15. More information coming soon about the symposium as a whole!
Much McCarthy at the ALA
There will be fully fifteen papers on McCarthy at this year's American Literature Association conference in Boston, a record for us! Check out the draft program for the conference here.
Wittliff Collections Acquires New Recordings
The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, home of the Cormac McCarthy Papers, has acquired recordings made by journalist Richard Woodward when he was interviewing McCarthy in 1992. Woodward was working on the New York Times article that accompanied McCarthy’s rise to fame, “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction.” The interviews took place over a few days, and total nearly four hours of conversation. Read more about the materials, and how to access them, here.
New York Public Library to Host Virtual Event on CM
On November 29, 2022, from 7:00-8:00 pm EST, the NYPL will host the virtual event “Cormac McCarthy: Our Past Is Real.” Steve Frye, Stacey Peebles, Lydia Cooper, and Scott Yarbrough will discuss McCarthy’s career and how the new novels will affect the way we think about the writer and his work. More info, and a link to RSVP, here!
Karol Jalochowski Releases 2017 Interview with McCarthy and David Krakauer
In 2017, fillmmaker Karol Jalochowski filmed McCarthy talking with David Krakauer, the President of the Santa Fe Institute, in the library of the SFI. He's now released that footage, over an hour of conversation between the two, and you can watch it here.
Society Folks in the News
Among the many news pieces about McCarthy's new novels, a couple have featured some familiar names! This New York Times article from October 14, 2022 quotes Rick Wallach and features one of Beowulf Sheehan's photos, and this NPR segment from October 22, 2022 has comments from Dianne Luce, Bryan Giemza, Lydia Cooper, and Stacey Peebles.
The Cormac McCarthy Journal Publishes Never-Before-Seen Interviews with McCarthy
Dianne C. Luce and Zachary Turpin have discovered five previously unknown interviews with McCarthy, and reprint those along with five other obscure interviews in a new CMJ article, "Cormac McCarthy's Interviews in Tennessee and Kentucky, 1968-1980." You can see the article for free, and read the full text of the interviews, until late December on Penn State UP's website. On September 30, the New York Times ran a piece about the interviews, which you can read here.
A Celebration of Cormac McCarthy in New York
On October 26 at 7:00 pm, Symphony Space in New York is partnering with Knopf to present an evening in celebration of McCarthy’s new novel The Passenger. The event will feature people including Joel Coen, Marlon James, Amor Towles, and Mary Karr for an evening of readings and conversation. Tickets are $17-26, and more information can be found here.
Society Establishes the Chip Arnold Research Award
The Cormac McCarty Society announces a new research award to help undergraduate and graduate students attend conferences and undertake research on McCarthy. This award honors Edwin T. “Chip” Arnold, the first President of the Cormac McCarthy Society from 1993 to 1998; editor, with Dianne C. Luce, of the collections Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy and A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy; as well as a colleague, mentor, and dear friend. We’re also happy to accept donations to help support this award. Click here to read more about the award!
New McCarthy Books Coming Out in the Fall
McCarthy’s new novel The Passenger, and its companion novel Stella Maris, will be released on October 25 and November 22, 2022. A box set of both novels will be available on December 6. We’ve been waiting for this one—as it turns out, these two—for a long, long time, so this is exciting news indeed. Penguin Random House has more information about the books here.
New Photos of McCarthy
Renowned photographer Beowulf Sheehan has taken McCarthy's most recent author photos, some of which can be seen on McCarthy's upcoming novels and in Beowulf's 2018 book Author: The Portraits of Beowulf Sheehan. With his permission, we're using a selection of never-before-seen images on this website, and we'll run an interview with Beowulf in the Fall 2022 issue of the Cormac McCarthy Journal. Stay tuned!
McCarthy Gives a Charming Little Interview
Lithub recently reported on two enterprising high school students who, in 2014, were tasked with giving a presentation to their AP English class on All the Pretty Horses. It turned out that they had a connection to the author, and so arranged to send him a list of questions—which he answered through a friend. Let’s hope they got an A! The interview can be read here.
Reading McCarthy Podcast
Scott Yarbrough debuted this new podcast back in January, and with 22 episodes to date on a variety of McCarthy-related topics, interest has been going strong. With well-known Cormackian readers and scholars like Steve Frye, Dianne Luce, and Jay Watson, Yarbrough explores different works and various essential aspects of McCarthy’s writing.
New Scholarly Books
Patrick O'Connor's Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned is now out from Edinburgh University Press. O'Connors argues that McCarthy's work articulates a distinct literary philosophy, one that pivots on themes of mortality, education, nihilism, the political, materialism, and language.
Lydia Cooper’s new book Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature, is now available! Cooper combines the fields of evolutionary economics and the humanities to examine how McCarthy’s works demonstrate our need to recognize the interrelated complexities of economic policies, environmental crises, and how public policy and rhetoric shape our value systems.
Approaches to Teaching the Works of Cormac McCarthy, edited by Stacey Peebles and Ben West, has finally hit the shelves, with chapters by a number of familiar names, and guidance for teaching McCarthy in a variety of classrooms and in many different contexts--from high school to grad school, with attention to topics like region, sexuality, apocalypse, violence, leadership, borders, and ecology.
