"With tremendous narrative drive, unpretentious grace, and a thorough grasp of McCarthy's themes, Kenneth Lincoln invites the reader into McCarthy's astonishingly creative and dramatic writing. Lincoln's timely study covers writing hybrids of mytho-poetic saga and red-dirt realism for our age. McCarthy's wise, dubious, existential edge reflects on the deepest American themes of regeneration through violence, particularly the roles of men in the creation of our inescapable national identity. His stories ask readers whether a country so created out of blood and greed can ever redeem itself. Lincoln limns the writer's deepest probings with enthusiastic invitations, excellent plot summaries, and thoughtful provocations. Cormac McCarthy allows students and general readers to ask the essential question: Can we survive our own culture of blood and violence?" - Peter Nabokov, Dept. of World Arts and Cultures, UCLA