This issue is being built in strange times, as the COVID-19 pandemic has made everyone feel like pilgrims exhausted on the face of the planet Anareta—or choose your favorite McCarthy passage to illustrate your feelings of fear, disorientation, and isolation. But of course McCarthy is good material for both acknowledging darkness and discerning the light. In a blog post for Cambridge University Press's “Cambridge Reflections” series, Steven Frye thinks about reading The Road in the midst of such circumstances, concluding that even given nature's indifference, we can be grateful “for each other, for self-sacrifice and commitment, and for the indefinable humanity that abides and sustains.” You can read his post in its entirety here:
http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2020/05/cormac-mccarthy-the-road/
So this issue does more of what we love—grappling with McCarthy in an ever-evolving set of contexts. Dianne Luce offers a new understanding of McCarthy's work on his yet-unpublished novel The Passenger, based on...
