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Blood Meridian

Name: Blood Meridian
Rating: 5 (12 reviews)
Author: Cormac McCarthy
ISBN: 9780679728757

Cormac McCarthy · 1992 · 368 pages

25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West.

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian 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.

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recommended by 12 people

sourced from public statements

Jocko Willink
“Was able to show the darkness in humanity and there’s nothing pleasant in any way, shape or form.”↗
Bryan Callen
“Top Must Reads”↗
Bradley Cooper
“You can pick any book by Cormac McCarthy, really, but all the characters—the judge, in particular—are just incredible.”↗
Kazuo Ishiguro
“When I arrived in England as a small boy from Japan, I promptly became obsessed with cowboys. I never fell out of love with Westerns, and became a huge fan of the great films of Ford, Hawks, Leone, Eastwood, and Peckinpah. But where were their literary equivalents? To an outsider, this is a gaping hole in American letters. But I found one magnificent novel, a work of unambiguously high ambition that takes on the myths of the frontier. The reach of McCarthy’s book is such that it goes way beyond America: It stares unflinchingly at human nature itself—at the darkness and violence from which we’re built, individually and societally. The story follows a gang of gunfighters who rampage around a Texas already scarred by butchery. Commissioned to slaughter hostile Native Americans, they are paid by the scalp, and soon cease to care where the scalps come from. There are staggering images of savagery, many of them hauntingly beautiful. Not for everyone (my wife always stops at the first massacre), but this is a monumental work of art.”↗
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