Cormac McCarthy's Borders and Landscapes, edited by Australian Cormackian Louise Jillett, is a major event in McCarthy studies. Excepting only Outer Dark and The Sunset Limited, this volume gathers discussions of nearly all major works by McCarthy, with a strong focus on the author's Western narratives—which makes sense, given the volume's title. Divided into five interrelated parts, comprising three chapters each, the collection of readings treats the following themes vis-à-vis McCarthy's writings: the frontier, literature and space, bioregionalism, liminality and transgressivity, and interdisciplinarity and intermediality.
In a sense, the collected readings are unparalleled in the scholarship so far, even though, admittedly, it is not apparent right away how and why one might arrive at such a verdict. There have already been published a number of great essay collections on the work of McCarthy, this giant of contemporary American prose. Starting from early volumes like Sacred Violence: A Reader's...
