Frequent guests Steven Frye and Stacey Peebles join me for another roundup of All the Pretty Horses, the National Book Award winning novel which finally forced the literary world to sit up and take notice of McCarthy. We climb on and hold tight for this ride through this incredible novel.

Stacey Peebles is Chair of the English program, Director of Film Studies, and the Marlene and David Grissom Professor of Humanities at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. She is the author of Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq (Cornell Univ Press, 2011) and Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen (Univ of Texas, 2017). She is editor of the collection Violence in Literature and, with Ben West, is co-editor of the volume Approaches to Teaching the Works of Cormac McCarthy, published this past year by MLA. She has published widely on the representation of contemporary war and on McCarthy, and has been editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal since 2010.

Steve Frye is professor and chair of English at California State University, Bakersfield and President of the Cormac McCarthy Society. He is the author of Understanding Cormac McCarthy (Univ. of South Carolina Press) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, and Cambridge UP’s Cormac McCarthy in Context. He has written numerous journal articles on Cormac McCarthy and other authors of the American Romanticist Tradition. Additionally, he is the author of the novel Dogwood Crossing and the forthcoming book, Unguessed Kinships: Naturalism and the Geography of Hope in Cormac McCarthy, University of Alabama Press.

Listeners are reminded this is a show of approachable literary criticism and not a review show, and so we don't always shy away from spoilers; discussions of his novel may spoil other parts of the Border Trilogy.

Thanks as well 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 us on Apple, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listeners may also enjoy the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL 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.

Correction: I made kind of a big deal in this and the other ATPH episode about how John Grady is not called a boy after he crosses into Mexico. I seem to have done the search wrong, because one excellent reader has found that he is, indeed, referred to as a boy after he’s in Mexico, but the collective group seems not to be called the boys in the after that point.

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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 37: Another Roundup of All the Pretty Horses, with Steven Frye and Stacey Peebles

Reading McCarthy