The Powerful Weirdness of Cormac McCarthy
On the death of a singular writer
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Cormac McCarthy died this week. With him went a style that seemed chiseled out of granite—biblical, as if produced by an Old Testament prophet who had somehow found himself wearing dusty dungarees and shuffling through a desert in the American Southwest. McCarthy’s commitment to writing in this otherworldly register feels like a last remnant of a literary world in which writers could push their singular visions regardless of whether they jibed with the times.
First, here are four new stories from’s Books section:
