| Product Summary | | Format: Hardcover | | ISBN: 9780307265432 | | Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf | | Publish Date: 9/26/2006 | | Buy.com Sku: 202453489 | | Item#: RC75UF | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 68799 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 9.75H x 6.25L x 1T | | Pages: 288 |
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| | | At once brutal and tender, despairing and rashly hopeful, spare of language and profoundly moving, this work is a fierce and haunting meditation on the tenuous divide between civilization and savagery, and the essential, sometimes terrifying power of filial love.
Annotation:
Cormac McCarthy's bleak vision of the American landscape has always had a cataclysmic undertone, so it comes as no surprise that THE ROAD is actually set in a post-apocalyptic world of ash and bitter cold where cannibalistic marauders roam the countryside. In this dire place, a man and his son travel towards the sea armed only with a revolver and two bullets. Amid this desolation, a tin of canned pears is thing of wonder, and a broken wheel on their shopping cart can mean the difference between life and death. Their love for each other is fierce, but the son fears that his father has, in his desperation, become as savage and brutal as the world around him. Cormac McCarthy writes with a searing white heat, his images and language strike deep in the reader, and his vision of humanity is inexorable and haunting.
| Praise| "[Cormac] McCarthy establishes himself here as the closest thing in American literature to an Old Testament prophet, trolling the blackest registers of human emotion to create a haunting and grim novel about civilization's slow death after the power goes out." 07/24/2006 "A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth." 07/15/2006 "[T]renchant and terrifying, written with stripped-down urgency and fueled by the force of a universal nightmare...THE ROAD would be pure misery if not for its stunning, savage beauty." - Janet Maslin 09/25/2006 "THE ROAD has what John Steinbeck called 'unity feeling,' the sense of everything having been allowed entirely to cohere....When his desire for poeticism is profitably channeled and controlled--as it is for the majority of THE ROAD--Cormac McCarthy shows that h e is one of the greatest writers alive." - Stephen Abell 11/10/2006 "[A] tense psychological drama about a man living on the edge of sanity." - Sebastian Shakespeare 11/01/2006 "Stunning and heart-wrenching...with the startling vividness and complexity of a Hieronymus Bosch painting." - David Hellman 10/22/2006 "[Cormac McCarthy] has given us his great American nightmare....THE ROAD is a novel of transforming power and formal risk....All the modern novel can do is done here....Beauty and goodness are here aplenty and we should think about them. While we can." - Alan Warner 11/04/2006 |
| Author Bio| Cormac McCarthy | | One of America's most formidable, iconoclastic, and enigmatic writers, Cormac McCarthy has been critically acclaimed since the publication of his first novel, THE ORCHARD KEEPER, in 1965, but he has resolutely stayed outside of the limelight of the literary world, diligently building a canon of works hailed as following in the tradition of Melville and Joyce. His editor at Random House, Albert Erskine, had edited William Faulkner, and echoes of Faulkner appeared in McCarthy's novels about the brutal and surreal South. He grew up in Tennessee, the third of six children, and oldest boy, in a Roman Catholic family; he was originally named Charles, but renamed himself Cormac after an Irish king. After dropping out of the University of Tennessee, and serving four years stationed in Alaska in the U.S. Air Force, McCarthy married the poet Lee Holleman, and moved to Chicago where he worked as an auto mechanic while finishing his first novel. (After their marriage ended, Holleman wrote DESIRE'S DOOR, a book of poems about their relationship.) Using fellowship money from the American Academy of Arts and Letter, McCarthy traveled to Ireland; on the ship crossing, he met an Englishwoman, Anne DeLisle, and they were married in England in 1966. The two traveled Europe and lived on the island of Ibiza where he completed his second novel, OUTER DARK, a bleak parable about the birth, theft, and early death of a child born out of incest. Though his fiction received wide-spread acclaim, McCarthy's dark novels never achieved large sales. He survived through various grants (including a Guggenheim) and by living an austere lifestyle in a barn on a hog farm in Tennessee--he renovated it entirely by himself, building a stone chimney, cutting and kiln-drying wood, and making a fireplace out of bricks salvaged from the boyhood home. Despite their poverty, McCarthy would decline offers to speak or lecture, and has only given one print interview (to The New York Times). In 1985, after winning the McArthur "Genius Grant" McCarthy wrote BLOOD MERIDIAN, the first of his novels to be set in Texas and the Southwest, and considered by many to be his masterpiece. By this time, his second marriage had ended, and McCarthy was living in motels, carrying a high-watt bulb to write by. With ALL THE PRETTY HORSES, the first of his "Border Crossing" trilogy, McCarthy finally began to emerge in the public consciousness, and when in 2007 his post-apocalyptic novel THE ROAD was selected for the Oprah Book Club and won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, his literary ascendance was complete. Over 1,000,000 copies of the novel were printed, and critics lavished praise on McCarthy's starkly riveting and prophetic prose. McCarthy's subjects have always been universal, Biblical, and filled with the desperation of humanity; in the 1980s, Saul Bellow honored McCarthy's "absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences." |
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| Customer Reviews | ![]() | | Writing |  4 | | Content | 4 | | Readability | 4 | | Overall Satisfaction |  5 |
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5 of 5 Great story about survival and the relationship be Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Jason from Bakersfield, Ca
Now if you're looking for an action packed why, how and with what post apocolyptic novel you should look elsewhere. I had never read any of Cormac McCarthy's work so I had no idea what to expect. It definitely reads much like a classic "artsy" (for lack of a better term) novel. No chapters, no dialogue puncuation, etc. Now his style of writing is full of metaphors and poetic lines, but it does not flow well so I had to read it more carefully than most novels. In the beginning it was getting tiresome, but after a few pages I was used to it. This book is at it's core about a relationship between a father and son and the darkest depths of human survival. It is not about when or why or how the world ended, but merely a microscopic view of two individuals in this setting and their relationship and experiences. There is no great plot here, and it has a somewhat anticlimactic ending, but it is an amazing piece of work. Do not be swayed by the reviewers who hate it because nothing happened, or it was pointless. They merely fail to see the underlying layers of this narrative and what the author was trying to communicate. Was this review helpful?  
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