What books does Cormac McCarthy recommend?

The Cormac McCarthy book recommendations here come from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who chronicled the violence and moral complexity of the American frontier in works like Blood Meridian and The Road. Sixteen titles are drawn from rare interviews with the New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, and materials tied to his years at the Santa Fe Institute. Fiction and philosophy lead, with a distinctive strand of hard science reflecting his scientific circle. His touchstone is Melville's Moby Dick, and he holds that the good writers are Melville, Dostoevsky and Faulkner, because they deal with issues of life and death. Alongside those he names The Brothers Karamazov and The Sound and the Fury, and calls Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas a classic of our time. McCarthy also authored 16 books here, among them The Road, Blood Meridian, and No Country for Old Men.

Last updated March 2026 · Every recommendation cited to its original source.