“... applies to Nabokov; or, for that matter, to Bellow, Updike, Compton-Burnett, Iain Sinclair, Cormac McCarthy, Roth, Ozick, etc. (Lurking in Wood’s idea is the implication that modern critics and readers make too much of signature.) Nabokov’s signature is often both what initially attracts readers to his work, and what puts them off it, or causes ...”

“... are in charge.It’s difficult to imagine a world in which no other people exist. Writers try. Cormac McCarthy did in The Road, where father and son, post-apocalypse, are attempting to survive by making their way south out of the cold. How are you going to fill a book with just man talking to boy? Fifty pages through the novel they finally see someone ...”

“... folly that it remains for American writers who prefer the national mannerism of the barbaric yawp. Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Rush are exact contemporaries, born in 1933. McCarthy excels at antique dialogue and rapturous word-pictures of frontier landscapes; likes to portray violence; won’t represent ...”

“... literature ought to share generic features with its more popular cousins, but it doesn’t; Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Lethem are not of the same genre as Philip K. Dick, however long Margaret Atwood managed to ‘pass’. Indeed, the solution may actually be a rather simple one, namely that modernism is not a genre, while SF emphatically is ...”

“... way and the whole fucking thing drained into some unguessed world of caverns deep in the earth?’ Cormac McCarthy wrote in The Passenger. ‘Your plate-eyed krakens with their eighty-foot-long testicles. Then a big smell and then nothing. Whoops. Where’d everybody go?’As civil engineering, the 16-mile-long bore of the Super Sewer is an achievement to ...”

“... as a major writer, the poète maudit of black America. Like his mentor Faulkner (and later Cormac McCarthy), Himes appealed to a Parisian readership convinced of the essential savagery of American life. ‘What the great body of Americans most disliked’ about his work, Himes believed, ‘was the fact that I came too close to the truth.’ He ...”

“... since Fargo, and this truly is a strange effect, since the movie manages to be very different from Cormac McCarthy’s novel through an extravagant, literal fidelity to a great deal of it. The fidelity is both verbal (there are transpositions and compressions of course, but a very large number of the novel’s sentences make it unchanged into the ...”

“... He might have ruined it with its women: the Toni Ware chapter in particular sounds like Cormac McCarthy breaking his hymen on horseback. (RIP.) He might have ruined it with his doubt, which caused him to turn somersaults like a cracked-out fairground child. (‘Is it showing off if you hate it?’ Hal Incandenza asks in Infinite Jest.) But it ...”

“... collection, Legend of a Suicide (2008), and a memoir, A Mile Down (2005) – is a book that makes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road read like a walk in the park. Compared to Caribou Island, The Road is grim-lit lite. After 200 pages of unrelenting misery, McCarthy breaks down and accepts the possibility of grace: after a ...”