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Powell's Q&A, Kids' Q&A | February 2, 2012

Emily Winfield Martin: IMG Kids' Q&A: Emily Winfield Martin

2 comments By Emily Winfield Martin

Describe your new book. Oddfellow's Orphanage is a series of stories/vignettes that tell the tale of the newest arrival to a curious orphanage, a... Continue »
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More copies of this ISBN

The Orchard Keeper

by Cormac McCarthy

The Orchard Keeper Cover

ISBN13: 9780679728726
ISBN10: 0679728724
All Product Details

 

Staff Pick

Set in rural Tennessee between the two world wars, The Orchard Keeper is an apocolyptic tale of an orphan, a bootlegger, and various other roustabouts trying to make their way in an unseemly world. To readers of the Border Trilogy: this bleak, violent, and incredibly moving book may change your idea of how McCarthy views the world.
Recommended by Brodie, Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

An American classic, The Orchard Keeper is the first novel by one of America's finest, most celebrated novelists. Set is a small, remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, it tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father. Together with Rattner's Uncle Ather, who belongs to a former age in his communion with nature and his stoic independence, they enact a drama that seems born of the land itself. All three are heroes of an intense and compelling celebration of values lost to time and industrialization.
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About the Author

Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island in 1933 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.
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What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 3 comments:
lukas, August 22, 2011 (view all comments by lukas)
McCarthy is among our most acclaimed/respected living writers, but it took him a while to get there. His debut novel came out way back in the 60s and, well, for fans of "The Road" and "No Country for Old Men," they'll likely find this strange, cryptic and off-putting. Sometimes I think he's a tad overrated and this novel didn't change that feeling, as it's rather meandering, willfully enigmatic and lacking in quotation marks for dialogue. I'm not even sure what happened frankly, but at least it's short.
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Christopher D Himes, October 7, 2008 (view all comments by Christopher D Himes)
An impressionistic story--nothing is told to you in a direct manner in this, Cormac McCarthy's first novel. Very poetic and dark, like watching a movie through a dirty lens smeared with petroleum that catches the light in flares every now and then. This novel is the primordial stuff from which each of his subsequent books has emerged, containing, as it does, all the core elements that have appeared again and again. I would recommended this book to someone who has read a few of his others first.
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shantystix, September 18, 2008 (view all comments by shantystix)
Nothing much seemed connected, a bewildered choice of words made for confusion, a narritive not to well connected, got boring for me.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780679728726
Author:
McCarthy, Cormac
Publisher:
Vintage Books USA
Location:
New York :
Subject:
General
Subject:
Literary
Subject:
Fiction
Subject:
Psychological fiction
Subject:
Community life
Subject:
Community life -- Tennessee, East -- Fiction.
Subject:
Tennessee, East
Subject:
Community life -- Fiction.
Subject:
Literature-A to Z
Copyright:
1993
Edition Description:
Trade paper
Series:
Vintage International
Series Volume:
no. (HCFA)
Publication Date:
19930231
Binding:
TRADE PAPER
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Illustrations:
Y
Pages:
256
Dimensions:
7.98x5.10x.58 in. .42 lbs.
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Related Aisles

The Orchard Keeper New Trade Paper
0 stars - 0 reviews
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Product details 256 pages Vintage Books USA - English 9780679728726 Reviews:
"Staff Pick" by ,

Set in rural Tennessee between the two world wars, The Orchard Keeper is an apocolyptic tale of an orphan, a bootlegger, and various other roustabouts trying to make their way in an unseemly world. To readers of the Border Trilogy: this bleak, violent, and incredibly moving book may change your idea of how McCarthy views the world.

by Brodie
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