I only want to write beautiful literary fiction. I hope to rip out your heart, but while it’s in my care and before I return it, I aspire to inflate it. The struggle and the discipline. The goalpost of perfection. Hurt & Happy. Joy & Suffering. Light & Dark. Coarse & Smooth. Refined & Crude. I want to polish and weave. I want to render and affect. I write, as well, for my own exploration and understanding of the world. I aspire to move you by writing the toils and treasures of our shared human experience.
He’s known as the trapper and his family has a long history in these isolated woods. Now it’s just him and the boy, and he’ll raise him in the world he knows, the forest, where threats take recognizable forms: harsh weather, peak predators, the encroachment of civilization at odds with their lifestyle. But for those lands and minds with an unsettled past, other dangers may lurk in the woods where father and son hunt the timber. One fateful day their woodland life is violently broken—shouldn’t those guilty of such injustice be held to account? Though at times gritty even violent, there is raw grace in these pages like veins of gold running through black quartz.
I believe if you want to show the brightest light, you should surround it with pitch dark. McCarthy writes a bleak tale that truly illuminates the love between a father and son. In the obscurity of dusk and ash, their bond becomes palpable. On exhibit is humankind’s grit, moments of joy amidst hardship, and hope. As always, his prose is stunningly gorgeous. Cormac McCarthy is one of the very best writers in the history of the craft. I read him, in part, to educate myself as an author.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive, this "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle).
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if…
A tragic coming of age story. I like how the young man puts his beliefs on the line, how he pursues beauty and dares to live by his own values and within his unique conception of the world. I’ve always found McCandless’ final quote interesting, “Happiness is only real when shared.” I no longer believe that is true, not totally, but it’s thoughtworthy. Into the Wild and my first book have their parallels.
Krakauer’s page-turning bestseller explores a famed missing person mystery while unraveling the larger riddles it holds: the profound pull of the American wilderness on our imagination; the allure of high-risk activities to young men of a certain cast of mind; the complex, charged bond between fathers and sons.
"Terrifying... Eloquent... A heart-rending drama of human yearning." —New York Times
In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all…
Ernest Hemingway ties Cormac McCarthy as the two authors that have most significantly influenced me. His prose is beautiful while being sparse. He writes without pretense, and with his unique writing of internality his stories become authentic glimpses of character. He describes scenes vividly using few words by employing our own memory banks to the topic. He captures life so very well. This story is timeless and imagistic. I’ve read it many times and have many more reads in me. Hemingway, McCarthy, Marquez, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, these are the writers that I consider my teachers—I hope my work is never derivative of, only inspired by them.
This powerful and dignified story about a Cuban fisherman's struggle with a great fish has the universal appeal of a struggle between man and the elements, the hunter with the hunted. It earned Hemingway the Nobel prize and has been made into an acclaimed film. Age 13+
Given both its breadth and depth, I can always come back to this novel. There are many interesting philosophical ideas, the history is fascinating, and I love how each character lives very differently. The constant question of what gives life value and how to meet our death, and seeing perspectives change for those who are privileged to live out long lives. A masterwork. In my personal life, philosophical questions are not abstract concepts, and life is worthy of deep thought. The novel is a great place to navigate life’s big questions. If I’m fortunate enough to have your readership, you’ll see this in my work as well.
From the award-winning translators of Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov comes this magnificent new translation of Tolstoy's masterwork.
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read
War and Peacebroadly focuses on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both…
If to people I love I could only give a single book, this would be it. I’ve read it three times and will revisit it until I die. Imprison a man in hell on Earth where the souls of his loved ones rise from the smokestacks of the crematorium within his sight. His friends die starving and beaten in the mud. What’s left of human dignity? Is there anything redeeming? Is there a chance for forgiveness, or even beauty or love? This tragic account of an appalling time is one of the greatest books ever written. I improve as a writer by improving as a human. This book does that.
One of the outstanding classics to emerge from the Holocaust, Man's Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl's story of his struggle for survival in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. Today, this remarkable tribute to hope offers us an avenue to finding greater meaning and purpose in our own lives.
I became fascinated with 16th-century and 17th-century Europe after reading Don Quixote many years ago. Since then, every novel or nonfiction book about that era has felt both ancient and contemporary. I’m always struck by how much our environment has changed—transportation, communication, housing, government—but also how little we as people have changed when it comes to ambition, love, grief, and greed. I doubled down my reading on that time period when I researched my novel, Dulcinea. Many people read in the eras of the Renaissance, World War II, or ancient Greece, so I’m hoping to introduce them to the Baroque Age.
Dolça Llull Prat, a wealthy Barcelona woman, is only 15 when she falls in love with an impoverished poet-solder. Theirs is a forbidden relationship, one that overcomes many obstacles until the fledgling writer renders her as the lowly Dulcinea in his bestseller.
By doing so, he unwittingly exposes his muse to gossip. But when Dolça receives his deathbed note asking to see her, she races across Spain with the intention of unburdening herself of an old secret.
On the journey, she encounters bandits, the Inquisition, illness, and the choices she's made. At its heart, Dulcinea is about how we betray the people we love, what happens when we succumb to convention, and why we squander the few chances we get to change our lives.
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