Rare Book of the Day – Suttree, Cormac McCarthy. First Edition.

I picked up this one today and am pretty excited about it. One could make the argument that Cormac McCarthy is the greatest living writer, and I'd be hard pressed to find a counterargument. His 1992 novel All the Pretty Horses won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Road, which was adapted for the silver screen in 2009. His novel No Country for Old Men also saw a film adaption in the Cohen Brother's classic starring Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem. Furthermore, the famous literary critic Harold Bloom called McCarthy's Blood Meridian "the single greatest book since Faulkner's As I Lay Dying." That's some high praise.

Suttree is his fourth published novel, although he began working on it prior to the publication of his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965. It is a departure from his other novels, in that it is semi-autobiographical, much longer and sprawling in structure, and somewhat humorous. This is the scarce first printing which, as with all of McCarthy's early works, was in a rather small print run: