I love this sentence. So true. "I think sometimes of wisdom as the ability to hold the totality of life, the wiser you are, the more of life you can hold.” From The Ezra Klein Show: The America That’s Still Possible, Jul 3, 2026 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…

My second novel, “Children of Saturn,” wrapped its award season with a strong showing:   IPPY Bronze – Audiobook: Mystery/Thriller Hoffer Grand Prize Shortlist Hoffer Montaigne Medal Shortlist   These are juried, competitive independent publisher awards. Like most major prizes—including the Pulitzer, NBA, and Booker—they require submission.   Past IPPY winners include Ferrante, Atwood, Eggers, McSweeney’s, Graywolf, and university presses like Stanford and Princeton. This year’s Montaigne winner came from University of Chicago Press; the Hoffer Grand Prize went to Rose Metal Press.   Bridesmaid, but in a very competitive wedding. The IPPYs have only three audiobook slots and no “historical” or “literary fiction” categories.   “Children of Saturn” didn’t win the Utah Book Award, as my debut “Logos” did, but Utah Humanities changed the rules to require in-state residency so we couldn’t enter it.   One twist: “Children of Saturn” made the Hoffer Grand Prize shortlist while the Montaigne Medal winners did not.   Grateful to Charles Leggett for voicing the audiobook with such depth and power.   The novel is set during the French Revolution and told through Thomas Paine, Camille Desmoulins, and Joseph Fouché—a story of idealism, betrayal, and how revolutions devour their children.

#TheBorderTrilogy The epilogue of Cities of the Plain is more uplifting than I recall. After the horrifying end before it, the comedy of Billy Parham and the other vagabond beneath the freeway overpass discussing the other man’s fantastic dreams is a relief—as is the realization that Billy has lived 78 years and had a life that he values. It’s striking that the trauma of his past that is most indelible is the death of his brother, Boyd, and he no longer thinks about John Grady. Boyd was his brother and is the one Billy could not protect. The she-wolf he could not save. John Grady, in a way, was both — brother and creature of light — and his death, though cruel, was chosen. So, Cities of the Plain has in many ways McCarthy’s happiest ending. What do these last lines mean (I’m sure the speculation has been endless)? "Well, Mr Parham, I know who you are. And I do know why. You go to sleep now. I’ll see you in the morning. Yes mam."

#TheBorderTrilogy Rereading The Crossing after a dozen years I wondered if it would meet expectations. My memory and regard for the novel could not have been higher, so I had set a high bar. And, naturally, after about twelve years I had changed and read a lot of books I loved. This time, The Crossing did not disappoint. On the contrary. I got even more out of it. McCarthy’s mature philosophical vision is displayed in the Crossing through nature, the cruelty of men punctuated by the kindness of women and sometimes men, and the myriad philosophers at every turn among the poor rural people.  The vaqueros, the gypsies, the long suffering women, the ex-Mormon, the blind man, the sepulturero, and others.  Some call Suttree an autobiographical novel. I think there is also much of McCarthy in The Crossing.  Seems to me that the two novels form the arc of his philosophical development. Suttree, like McCarthy, walks away from a comfortable, upper-middle-class background. He lives on the fringes of Knoxville and sojourns in the Smoky Mountains, surviving among drunks, thieves, the dying — deliberately choosing the margins. But Suttree is wry, self-effacing, ironic, surrounded by grotesques, sort of a comic hell. In the Crossing, Billy Parham bears witness, endures, grieves, and keeps moving. Avoids explaining himself; he is quiet, grave, and solitary, moved by moral instinct, not ideology, drawn to the mystery of the world, its harshness, beauty, and inscrutability. Here we see the fruition of McCarthy’s obsessions: The silence of God, the structure of the universe, the failure of reason to grasp first principles, the hollowness of most forms of belief, yet the dignity of enduring anyway. McCarthy’s mature philosophical vision doesn’t arrive through system or doctrine, but through encounter — through the land, through suffering, through story, and especially through the voices of the humble and dispossessed. Blood Meridian, Suttree, The Crossing—the Holy Trinity of McCarthy’s works.

#TheBorderTrilogy The Crossing: ‘The corrido is the poor man’s history. It does not owe its allegiance to the truths of history but to the truths of men. It tells the tale of that solitary man who is all men.’ “The desolation of that place was a thing exquisite. . . . The little desert foxes barking. The old gods of that country tracing his progress over the darkened ground. Perhaps logging his name into their ancient daybook of vanities.”

#TheBorderTrilogy The Crossing's Blind Man's answer to the problem of evil: “Lo que debemos entender,” said the blind man, “es que ultimamente todo es polvo. Todo lo que podemos tocar. Todo lo que podemos ver. En esto tenemos la evidencia más profunda de la justicia, de la misericordia. En esto vemos la bendición más grande de Dios.” Translation: “What we must understand,” said the blind man, “is that ultimately everything is dust. Everything we can touch. Everything we can see. In this we have the deepest evidence of justice, of mercy. In this we see the greatest blessing of God.” The problem of evil is the price for life itself? Or, the blind man’s words echo Ecclesiastes — “All is vanity”. But That all passes away is a form of mercy: even suffering, even injustice, even grief — all are finite.

#TheBorderTrilogy Prophetic. "That the suck and whiff at his ear had been the bullet passing and that he had seen it for one frozen moment before his eyes with the sun on the side of the small revolving core of metal, the lead wiped bright by the rifling of the bore."

#TheBorderTrilogy I love this. An island of charity and kindness on a sea of cruelty, the contrast helping to make the moment sublime. Field hands appear out of nowhere in the bed of an old truck and save Billy Parham's brother from would be killers. "Blood was a condition of their lives and none asked what had befallen him or why. They called him él güerito and passed him up into the truck and wiped the blood from their hands on the front of their shirts. A lookout was standing with one hand on top of the cab watching the riders out on the plain."

#TheBorderTrilogy In the Crossing the country is filled with philosophers. "The old man said that the ox was an animal close to God as all the world knew and that perhaps the silence and the rumination of the ox was something like the shadow of a greater silence, a deeper thought. He looked up. He smiled. He said that in any case the ox knew enough to work so as to keep from being killed and eaten and that was a useful thing to know."

#TheBorderTrilogy McCarthy's meticulous and poetic portrayals of the beauty and skill of manual labor go hand in hand with the way he honors poor rural dwellers, often women who hold their fragile societies together, with his artistry. Here, in the Crossing: "The women knelt on the packed dirt and leaned over the coals and turned with their bare hands the tortillas off the hot sheetiron comals leaving along the unleavened edges like tallymarks fingerprints of black from where they’d fed the charcoal fire."

#TheBorderTrilogy Billy Parham's revelation, so human and universal, yet here so poetically and originally put: "She bent and caught her falling hair in her arms and held it and she passed one hand over the surface of the water as if to bless it and he watched and as he watched he saw that the world which had always been before him everywhere had been veiled from his sight."

#TheBorderTrilogy And in a short passage McCarthy turns a story about two young American brothers on a personal quest to recover their murdered father's stolen horses in Mexico into an epic spanning the ages: "The Tarahumara had watered here a thousand years and a good deal of what could be seen in the world had passed this way. Armored Spaniards and hunters and trappers and grandees and their women and slaves and fugitives and armies and revolutions and the dead and the dying."