In this episode, we’ll discuss the life and work of the late Cormac McCarthy, whose novels about wayward characters in the rural American South and Southwest are noted for their dark violence, dense prose, and stylistic complexity. During his long career, McCarthy wrote twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, many of them in the Western and post apocalyptic genres. The recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship, he also won a number of literary awards including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most notable works include Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and No Country for Old Men.
For this episode we are pleased to speak with Amit Majmudar and Fernando A. Flores. Amit Majmudar is a novelist, poet, translator, essayist and diagnostic nuclear radiologist. The winner of an Anne Halley Prize and a Pushcart Prize, he also served as Ohio’s first Poet Laureate. Fernando A. Flores is a novelist and short story writer whose debut novel Tears of the Trufflepig was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Flores was born in Mexico and grew up in South Texas, a region where many of McCarthy’s novels take place. You can read their full bios in the episode description.
Amit and Fernando are interviewed by Nate King, Digital Content Associate at the American Writers Museum. This conversation originally took place July 20th, 2023 and was recorded over Zoom.
More about our guests:
Fernando A. Flores was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and is the author of Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas, Tears of the Trufflepig, and Valleyesque.
Amit Majmudar‘s newly published collection of essays is Black Avatar and Other Essays (Acre Books, 2023). Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023) is his forthcoming memoir, in prose and verse, about his son’s congenital heart disease. The first volume of his Mahabharata trilogy, The Book of Vows, is forthcoming in India (Penguin India, 2023), as well as a book for younger readers, The Later Adventures of Hanuman (Puffin India, 2023).