The Crossing

Cormac McCarthy is a modern American classic of the highest caliber: a MacArthur Fellow “for genius,” a master of complex emotions and unconventional syntax—well known to our readers for the novels “No Country for Old Men” (the Coen brothers’ film adaptation of this book received four “Oscars”), “The Road” (which won the Pulitzer Prize and was also adapted for film), and “Blood Meridian” (“a kind of mixture of Dante’s ‘Hell,’ ‘The Iliad,’ and ‘Moby-Dick,’” in the words of Booker Prize winner John Banville).

“Outer Dark” is one of the novels in the “Border Trilogy.” It is a magnificent blend of a heroic saga and a melodrama, imbued with the directness of a classic western.

“Cormac McCarthy’s world is an old world, more spacious than the one we’re used to; it is a world that does not tolerate haste, a world of moral absolutes, a world openly contrasted with modern times” (New Republic).