McCarthy Society Updates
Registration Open for Savannah
Fall 2022 Cormac McCarthy Society Conference
Sept. 21-23, 2022
Click here for info about the conference, to register for the conference, and to see the program.
Renowned photographer Beowulf Sheehan, whose author photos of McCarthy are featured on this site, will give a keynote address featuring previously unseen photos of McCarthy at the Santa Fe Institute and his home, and reflections on a career building bridges between visual and textual storytelling. The conference will conclude with a tour of an exhibition of these photos at the Location Gallery, across the street from the DeSoto.
New CFP: Southwest Popular/American Culture Association
February 22-25, 2023 in Albuquerque, NM
CFP Deadline October 1, 2022
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.
