Cormac McCarthy's House: Reading McCarthy Without Walls (Southwestern Writers Collection)

Novelist Cormac McCarthy s brilliant and challenging work demands deep engagement from his readers. In Cormac McCarthy s House, author, painter, photographer, and actor-director Peter Josyph draws on a wide range of experience to pose provocative, unexpected questions about McCarthy s work, how it is achieved, and how it is interpreted.

As a visual artist, Josyph wrestles with the challenge of rendering McCarthy s former home in El Paso as a symbol of a great writer s workshop. As an actor and filmmaker, he analyzes the high art of Tommy Lee Jones in The Sunset Limited and No Country for Old Men. Invoking the recent suicide of a troubled friend, he grapples with the issue of our brother s keeper in The Crossing and The Sunset Limited. But for Josyph, reading the finest prose-poet of our day is a project into which he invites many voices, and his investigations include a talk with Mark Morrow about photographing McCarthy while he was writing Blood Meridian; an in-depth conversation with director Tom Cornford on the challenges of staging The Sunset Limited and The Stonemason; a walk through the streets, waterfronts, and hidden haunts of Suttree with McCarthy scholar and Knoxville resident Wesley Morgan; insights from the cast of The Gardener s Son about a controversial scene in that film; actress Miriam Colon s perspective on portraying the Due a Alfonsa opposite Matt Damon in All the Pretty Horses; and a harsh critique of Josyph s views on The Crossing by McCarthy scholar Marty Priola, which leads to a sometimes heated debate. Illustrated with thirty-one photographs, Josyph s unconventional journeys into the genius of Cormac McCarthy form a new, highly personal way of appreciating literary greatness.