Poetry Month!
 
 

Special Offers see all

Enter to WIN!

Weekly drawing for $100 credit. Subscribe to our Specials newsletter for a chance to win.
Privacy Policy

More at Powell's

Recently Viewed clear list

Interviews | April 22, 2013

Jill Owens: IMG Anthony Marra: The Powells.com Interview

2 comments By Jill Owens

Anthony MarraAnthony Marra's debut novel is a marvel. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena describes, in astonishingly beautiful prose, five days in a rural... Continue »
  1. $18.20 Sale Hardcover add to wish list

    A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

    Anthony Marra 9780770436407
spacer
Ships free on qualified orders.
$10.50
List price: $15.00
Used Trade Paper
Ships in 1 to 3 days
Add to Wishlist
Qty Store Section
6 Burnside Literature- A to Z

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

by

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West Cover

ISBN13: 9780679728757
ISBN10: 0679728759
Condition: Standard
All Product Details

 

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Cormac McCarthy's masterwork, Blood Meridian, chronicles the brutal world of the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century. Its wounded hero, the teenage Kid, must confront the extraordinary violence of the Glanton gang, a murderous cadre on an official mission to scalp Indians. Loosely based on fact, the novel represents a genius vision of the historical West, one so fiercely realized that since its initial publication in 1985 the canon of American literature has welcomed Blood Meridian to its shelf.

Review:

"The book reads like a conflation of the Inferno, the Iliad, and Moby Dick...an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement." John Banville, The Independent

Review:

"A classic American novel of regeneration through violence. McCarthy can only be compared with our greatest writers, with Melville and Faulkner, and this is his masterpiece." Michael Herr

Review:

"McCarthy is a born narrator, and his writing has, line by line, the stab of actuality. He is here to stay." Robert Penn Warren

Synopsis:

An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

Publisher's Note: The 25th Anniversary Edition has been reset, causing the text to reflow. Page references based on earlier editions will no longer apply, so Vintage Books has compiled the following chart as a conversion aid. Download the chart by copying and pasting the following link into your browser:

http://knopfdoubleday.com/marketing/BloodMeridianPageReference.pdf

back to top

About the Author

Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island in1933 and spent most of his childhood near Knoxville, Tennessee. He served in the U.S. Air Force and later studied at the University of Tennessee. In 1976 he moved to El Paso, Texas, where he lives today. McCarthy's fiction parallels his movement from the Southeast to the West — the first four novels being set in Tennessee, the last three in the Southwest and Mexico. The Orchard Keeper (1965) won the Faulkner Award for a first novel; it was followed by Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), Suttree (1979), Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses, which won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for fiction in 1992, and The Crossing.
back to top

What Our Readers Are Saying

Add a comment for a chance to win!
Average customer rating based on 8 comments:
Lawson, January 5, 2013 (view all comments by Lawson)
I hesitated to start reading this book because I've never enjoyed westerns. But the writing in Blood Meridian hooked me. The story is a dark Bildungsroman with a tragic conclusion. The action is rendered in graphic prose that feels like poetry. The story, the atmosphere, the writing style, the mystery of "where is this book going?" -- all transcend the western genre, which is probably why this book is almost never found in the "western" section of bookstores. In fact, where it belongs is in the "classics" section, because McCarthy produced a masterpiece with Blood Meridian.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
report this comment
Elliott Blackwell, January 26, 2012 (view all comments by Elliott Blackwell)
There are two things I can always count on to be bleak: Nick Cave songs and Cormac McCarthy novels. Blood Meridian is an amazing and graphically brutal work. While the bloody Sam Peckinpah style violence proliferates every chapter, its the magnificent and poetic prose that helped me navigate this hellish West that at times bore more resemblance to a Hieronymous Bosch painting. Unlike other writers, McCarthy writes about violence as violence and not as anything symbolic. He is definitely one of the truly great American authors.

Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
report this comment
David Stanton, January 1, 2012 (view all comments by David Stanton)
Powerful and haunting.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
report this comment
View all 8 comments
back to top

Product Details

ISBN:
9780679728757
Author:
McCarthy, Cormac
Publisher:
Vintage Books USA
Location:
New York :
Subject:
General
Subject:
Literary
Subject:
Historical
Subject:
Fiction
Subject:
Indians of north america
Subject:
West (u.s.)
Subject:
Historical - General
Subject:
Westerns
Subject:
Historical fiction
Subject:
Teenage boys
Subject:
Outlaws
Subject:
Mexican-american border region
Subject:
Massacres
Subject:
Outlaws -- West (U.S.) -- Fiction.
Subject:
Westerns - General
Subject:
Glanton Gang
Subject:
Indians of North America -- Fiction.
Subject:
Literature-A to Z
Copyright:
1992
Edition Description:
Trade paper
Series:
Vintage International
Series Volume:
no. 430
Publication Date:
19920531
Binding:
TRADE PAPER
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Illustrations:
Y
Pages:
368
Dimensions:
8 x 5.1 x 0.8 in 0.575 lb
back to top

Other books you might like

  1. All the Pretty Horses
    Used Trade Paper $2.95
  2. Outer Dark
    Used Trade Paper $8.00
  3. Border Trilogy #03: Cities of the Plain
    Used Trade Paper $5.95
  4. White Noise
    Used Trade Paper $4.50
  5. Housekeeping
    Used Mass Market $4.50
  6. The Known World
    Used Trade Paper $2.95
back to top

Related Subjects


Featured Titles » Literature
Fiction and Poetry » Literature » A to Z
Fiction and Poetry » Westerns » General

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West Used Trade Paper
0 stars - 0 reviews
$10.50 In Stock
Product details 368 pages Vintage Books USA - English 9780679728757 Reviews:
"Review" by , "The book reads like a conflation of the Inferno, the Iliad, and Moby Dick...an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement."
"Review" by , "A classic American novel of regeneration through violence. McCarthy can only be compared with our greatest writers, with Melville and Faulkner, and this is his masterpiece."
"Review" by , "McCarthy is a born narrator, and his writing has, line by line, the stab of actuality. He is here to stay."
"Synopsis" by , An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

Publisher's Note: The 25th Anniversary Edition has been reset, causing the text to reflow. Page references based on earlier editions will no longer apply, so Vintage Books has compiled the following chart as a conversion aid. Download the chart by copying and pasting the following link into your browser:

http://knopfdoubleday.com/marketing/BloodMeridianPageReference.pdf
spacer
spacer
  • back to top
Follow us on...




Powell's City of Books is an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, that fills a whole city block with more than a million new, used, and out of print books. Shop those shelves — plus literally millions more books, DVDs, and eBooks — here at Powells.com.