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John Sepich

“Sepich offers his insight and detailed research to the less knowledgeable reader. He crafts a book that will delight the McCarthy specialists.” —Western American Literature
 
Blood Meridian (1985), Cormac McCarthy’s epic tale of an otherwise nameless “kid” who in his teens joins a gang of licensed scalp hunters whose marauding adventures take place across Texas, Chihuahua, Sonora, Arizona, and California during 1849 and 1850, is widely considered to be one of the finest novels of the Old West, as well as McCarthy’s greatest work. The New York Times Book Review ranked it third in a 2006 survey of the “best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years,” and in 2005 Time chose it as one of the 100 best novels published since 1923. Yet Blood Meridian’s complexity, as well as its sheer bloodiness, makes it difficult for some readers. To guide all its readers and help them appreciate the novel’s wealth of historically verifiable characters, places, and events, John Sepich compiled what has become the classic reference work, Notes on Blood Meridian.
 
 Originally published in 1993, Notes remained in print for only a few years and has become highly sought-after in the rare book market, with used copies selling for hundreds of dollars. In bringing the book back into print to make it more widely available, Sepich has revised and expanded Notes with a new preface and two new essays that explore key themes and issues in the work. This amplified edition of Notes on Blood Meridian is the essential guide for all who seek a fuller understanding and appreciation of McCarthy’s finest work.

University of Texas Press

Southwestern Writers Collection Series, Wittliff Collections at Texas State University

Notes on Blood Meridian: Revised and Expanded Edition

Stephen Harrigan

The New York Times–bestselling author’s memoir of diving in the Caribbean offers “in precise, lucid, prose, the marvels of the sea bottom” (New Yorker).

Author Stephen Harrigan spent months diving on the coral reefs of Grand Turk Island in the Caribbean. In this evocative account, he describes his many explorations, both personal and natural. Though he is there to learn about the history of the coral reef, Harrigan freely admits that his true motivation is to become, at least for a time, his “underwater self.”
“Moving, intelligent and, in the best sense, literary. . . . Stephen Harrigan is anchored in reality; he knows that the environment he's describing is in serious jeopardy. At the same time, he has made this book sparkle with his remarkable ability to discuss the metaphysical and spiritual aspects of underwater exploration without ever sounding saccharine or murky.” —New York Times Book Review

Water and Light: A Diver's Journey to a Coral Reef

Sam Shepard

Johnny Dark

This collection shares decades of correspondence between the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and one of his closest friends—including personal photos.

One of America’s leading dramatists, as well as an accomplished actor, screenwriter, and director, Sam Shepard’s legacy includes immortal plays like True West and Buried Child, as well as memorable film roles, including his Academy Award-nominated performance in The Right Stuff. Though Shepard remained an intensely private man, he wrote candidly about his life and work in letters to his close friend Johnny Dark. His former father-in-law, Dark became a surrogate brother to Shepard, and even an artistic muse. Two Prospectors gathers nearly forty years of correspondence and transcribed conversations between them.

In these letters, the men open themselves to each other with gripping honesty. Shepard’s letters give us the deepest look we will ever get into his personal philosophy and creative process, while in Dark’s letters we discover insights into Shepard’s character that only an intimate friend could provide. The writers also reflect on the books and authors that stimulate their thinking, their relationships with women (including Shepard’s anguished decision to leave his wife and son for actress Jessica Lange), personal struggles, and accumulating years.
 Illustrated with Dark’s photographs of Shepard and their mutual family across many years, as well as facsimiles of numerous letters, Two Prospectors is a compelling portrait of a complex friendship that anchored both lives for decades, a friendship also poignantly captured in Treva Wurmfeld’s film, Shepard & Dark.

Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark

Peter Josyph

“Josyph takes an aggressively unconventional approach to McCarthy’s work, combining elements of travelogue, interview and memoir.” —The Washington Post
 
 In Cormac McCarthy’s House, author, painter, photographer, and actor-director Peter Josyph draws on a wide range of experience to pose provocative, unexpected questions about McCarthy’s work.
 
 As a visual artist, Josyph wrestles with the challenge of rendering McCarthy’s former home in El Paso as a symbol of a great writer’s workshop. As an actor and filmmaker, he analyzes the high art of Tommy Lee Jones in The Sunset Limited and No Country for Old Men. Invoking the recent suicide of a troubled friend, he grapples with the issue of “our brother’s keeper” in The Crossing and The Sunset Limited. But for Josyph, reading the finest prose-poet of our day is a project into which he invites many voices, and his investigations include a talk with Mark Morrow about photographing McCarthy while he was writing Blood Meridian; an in-depth conversation with director Tom Cornford on the challenges of staging The Sunset Limited and The Stonemason; a walk through the streets, waterfronts, and hidden haunts of Suttree with McCarthy scholar and Knoxville resident Wesley Morgan; insights from the cast of The Gardener’s Son about a controversial scene in that film; actress Miriam Colon’s perspective on portraying the Dueña Alfonsa opposite Matt Damon in All the Pretty Horses; and a harsh critique of Josyph’s views on The Crossing by McCarthy scholar Marty Priola, which leads to a sometimes heated debate. Illustrated with thirty-one photographs, Josyph’s unconventional journeys into the genius of Cormac McCarthy form a new, highly personal way of appreciating literary greatness.

Cormac McCarthy's House: Reading McCarthy Without Walls

Joe R. Lansdale

“Lansdale’s best known—and frequently most disturbing—stories . . . sanctified in the blood of the walking Western dead and righteously readable.” —The Austin Chronicle
 
 From the award-winning master of mojo storytelling, spinner of over-the-top yarns of horror, suspense, humor, mystery, science fiction, and even the Old West comes the first “true best of Lansdale” anthology. Sanctified and Chicken-Fried brings together a unique mix of well-known short stories and excerpts from his acclaimed novels, along with new and previously unpublished material. In this collection of gothic tales that explore the dark and sometimes darkly humorous side of life and death, you’ll meet traveling preachers with sinister agendas, towns lost to time, teenagers out for a good time who get more than they bargain for, and gangsters and strange goings-on at the end of the world. Out of the blender of Lansdale’s imagination spew tall tales about men and mules, hogs and races, that are, in his words, “the equivalent of Aesop meets Flannery O’Connor on a date with William Faulkner, the events recorded by James M. Cain.”
 
“He may be violent, gruesome and shocking, but Lansdale is also one of the greatest yarn spinners of his generation: fearless, earthy, original, manic and dreadfully funny . . . If you’re new to Lansdale, not easily shocked or offended, Sanctified and Chicken-Fried is a good place to jump in and hang on for a crazy ride off the rails.” —The Dallas Morning News