On June 13, 2023, we lost a literary giant. Cormac McCarthy, the greatest writer of our time (in this podcast's completely unbiased opinion) passed away in Santa Fe, New Mexico, his home these past couple of decades. E-mails and queries started pouring in, mostly asking, "are you going to do a special tribute podcast? And the answer to that, is yes. Episode 43 is the first of 3 planned tribute episodes to McCarthy.

Joining us for this first panel is a roundup of some of the usual suspects:

Dianne Luce, founding founding member and past president of the Cormac McCarthy Society, author of Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period (2009) and more recently Embracing Vocation: Cormac McCarthy's Writing Life, 1959-1974;

Stacey Peebles, Chair of the English program, Director of Film Studies, and the Marlene and David Grissom Professor of Humanities at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, author of Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen (2017) and co-editor of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Cormac McCarthy (2022, MLA press); she has been editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal since 2010, and is now the President of the Cormac McCarthy Society;

Bryan Giemza's books include the literary history Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South. Recently he has worked with the Texas Tech Climate Center and just out from Bloomsbury press is Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy’s Expanding Worlds;

Lydia Cooper's most recent book is Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature; other books includes Masculinities in Literature of the American West: and No More Heroes: Narrative Perspective and Morality in the Novels of books of Cormac McCarthy.

Thanks to Thomas Frye, who composed, performed, and produced the music for READING MCCARTHY. The views of the host and his guests do not necessarily reflect the views of their home institutions or the Cormac McCarthy Society. Download and follow on Apple, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’re agreeable it’ll help us if you provide favorable reviews on these platforms. If you enjoy this podcast you may also enjoy the GREAT AMERICAN PODCAST, hosted by myself and Kirk Curnutt.

To contact me, please reach out to readingmccarthy(@)gmail.com. Despite the evening redness in the west Reading McCarthy is also on Twitter. The website is at readingmccarthy.buzzsprout.com, and if you’d like to support the show you can click on the little heart symbol at the top of the webpage to buy the show a cappuccino, or you can support us at www.patreon.com/readingmccarthy.

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Starting in spring of 2023, the podcast began accepting minor sponsorship offers to offset the costs of the podcast. This may cause a mild disconnect in earlier podcasts where the host asks for patrons in lieu of sponsorships. But if we compare it to a very large and naked bald man in the middle of the desert who leads you to an extinct volcano to create gunpowder, it seems pretty minor...

Episode 43: Tribute to McCarthy, Part the First

Reading McCarthy