/lit/ - Literature

Don't know about better, but he is as talented with words and imagery. No amount of seethe will disprove that.

Granpa McCarthy turned 90 yesterday. Wish him bday /lit/

>>22252306
>All these literal whos
Who is this fuck spamming fucking Gass of all people as an example of a 1st rate fiction writer? He wasn't even the best essayist from the country, Davenport was.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/cormac-mccarthy-final-conversation-science-physics-fathers-sons-the-road-2023-6%3famp


>Eventually, we fell out of touch. Which was why, a few months ago, it was such a pleasant surprise to hear from him. At first he seemed confused, even though he was the one who had called me. "Maybe it's my phone," he said, "but you sound different." We soon sorted out that he hadn't meant to call me. He'd meant to dial David Krakauer, the director of SFI, but had hit my name instead. "You got the next David in the alphabet," I joked.

>Then we spent a few minutes catching up. I congratulated him on his two new novels, "The Passenger" and "Stella Maris," which teem with his wonder for science. I reminded him that when we first met, he told me he was working on five novels at once. (Which, according to my math, means there are still another three in the vault.) He told me he was looking forward to a visit with his family, and that he still hung out at SFI when he could.

>As he spoke, I heard something in his voice I hadn't heard before — age. I'd lost my father by then, and wanted to thank Cormac for the both of us. I told him what a personal and professional thrill it had been to meet him and get to know him and write about him. He'd helped inspire me to write my family's own story of life and death, "Alligator Candy," and for that, I was grateful. I didn't realize it would be our goodbye.

The final Triumph
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-final-triumph-of-cormac-mccarthy?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

>Some years ago, I was doing a book promotion tour, and my driver dropped me off early for an event at one of the largest indie bookstores in the country. I tracked down the store owner, and we both had time to kill. So we embarked on a far-ranging conversation about novels.

>The owner was just as passionate about books as me. It wasn’t just his job, it was his fixation. He was obsessively interested in contemporary fiction—and for a good reason: he often hosted the leading novelists of the day in his store. He knew them both as writers and individuals.

>He had stories to tell, and I couldn’t hear enough of them. I felt like a junkie who gets introduced to the cartel leader—the insider who can point me to ecstasies I don’t yet know about. So we had a lovely conversation. I still remember it years later—not just the dialogue but even more his love of literature.

>At one juncture, I asked my new friend a question. “But who is your favorite? You love all these writers, but who is the best living novelist?”

>He didn’t need to think for long.

>“Well, of course, there’s Cormac,” he said.

>[Long pause] “But he’s in a class by himself. So let’s talk about some others.”

>It was like I’d asked a Chicago Bulls fan to name the best basketball player of all time. The answer was so obvious that it was hardly worth discussing. You had to go down to number two or three on the list to get a real argument going.

>My interlocutor couldn’t even be bothered to give the full name. Just Cormac—like Elvis or Oprah or Pele. A couple syllables were sufficient.

>I knew many people who had the same view of Cormac McCarthy back then. And that was before he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Road, and the Coen brothers turned No Country for Old Men into a cult classic film. Even before those events, Cormac was larger than life, like a bleak Biblical prophet who somehow was writing novels in the current day.

>Was he our best contemporary American novelist?