Reading McCarthy
READING MCCARTHY is a podcast devoted to the consideration and discussion of the works of one of our greatest American writers, Cormac McCarthy. Each episode will call upon different well-known Cormackian readers and scholars to help us explore different works and various essential aspects of McCarthy’s writing. (Note these episodes try to offer accessible literary criticism and may contain spoilers from different McCarthy works.)
Reading McCarthy
Episode 35: Crossing the border on ALL THE PRETTY HORSES with Allen Josephs
Episode 35 takes a first ride across the border with the novel that would elevate McCarthy's profile and career. All the Pretty Horses won McCarthy the National Book Award following its publication in 1992 and was McCarthy's first best-selling novel. Our guest for this episode is Dr. Allen Josephs. A Hemingway scholar as well as a Cormackian, Allen Josephs is a past president of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society and a past president of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. He is the author of 15 books, including On Hemingway and Spain: Essays and Reviews 1979 – 2013; White Wall of Spain: The Mysteries of Andalusian Culture; and For Whom the Bell Tolls: Ernest Hemingway’s Undiscovered Country. He has edited four critical editions of the poetry of Federico García Lorca and a book of translations of Lorca’s poetry and prose, Only Mystery: Federico García Lorca’s Poetry in Word and Image. He has published numerous articles on Spain and Hispanic culture in the Atlantic, the New Republic, the Virginia Quarterly, the North Dakota Quarterly, and New York Times Book Review, as well as many publications in scholarly journals.
Additionally he has published numerous essays on McCarthy, some of which have been collected in On Cormac McCarthy: Essays on Mexico, Crime, Hemingway and God, published by New Street in 2016. Recently, he has translated with his daughter poet Laura Juliet Wood the work of Spanish poet Fernando Valverde, and their translation of The Insistence of Harm appeared in 2019 from the University Press of Florida. Future projects include a thematic memoir, centered on Josephs’ literary and taurine experiences from 1962 to the present. He is University Research Professor and Professor of Spanish at the University of West Florida where he has taught for more than five decades.
Thanks to Thomas Frye, who composed, performed, and produced the theme music and interludes 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. To contact me, please reach out to readingmccarthy(@)gmail.com. Find us on Twitter and Facebook; 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 page to buy the show a cappuccino, or you can support us at www.patreon.com/readingmccarthy.
Correction: I made kind of a big deal in this 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 will accept 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...
