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The Crossing

Audiobook
1 of 2 copies available
1 of 2 copies available
In The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy fulfills the promise of All the Pretty Horses and at the same time give us a work that is darker and more visionary, a novel with the unstoppable momentum of a classic western and the elegaic power of a lost American myth. In the late 1930s, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family's ranch. But instead of killing it, he decides to take it back to the mountains of Mexico. With that crossing, he begins an arduous and often dreamlike journey into a country where men meet ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat-lightning—a world where there is no order "save that which death has put there." An essential novel by any measure, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops, and starts the heart and mind at once.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 13, 1995
      This second volume of McCarthy's Border Trilogy-an 11-week PW bestseller-follows two teenage boys across the American Southwest and Mexico in the years before WWII.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Billy Parham is just a boy of 16 when he crosses into Mexico to return a wounded wolf to her mountain home. But there he crosses more than a national boundary. He rides a journey from life through death to the dark places where only the gods lie in wait. Gently but with comforting regularity, Alexander Adams (aka Grover Gardner) narrates the passage across that border. The deliberate opaqueness in McCarthy's text calls for a reader of Adams's craft and stature. His voice has the authority and confidence of an adult telling a story, the meaning and wisdom of which he knows well. This confidence is important to the reader--as an anchor is to a boat adrift on rough seas. For The Crossing, indeed for all of Cormac McCarthy's work, is a rough sea, and Adams gives us this minimal but necessary assurance that the voyage will be worth it. P.E.F. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from May 30, 1994
      Young Billy Parham, in a horse stall, dreams of his father's eyes, ``those eyes that seemed to contemplate with a terrible equanimity the cold and the dark and the silence that moved upon him.'' Billy could as well be dreaming of McCarthy's prose and the unsparing tone of this, the second volume in the Border Trilogy. The Crossing , following the award-winning and bestselling All the Pretty Horses , is set in the American Southwest and in Mexico, and features, like its predecessor, teenage boys, their horses, a girl and the recurring spectacles of desert days and nights, awful wonders and appalling deprivations, and no small amount of roadside philosophizing. The story of Billy, his younger brother Boyd, the fates of their horses, a wolf, their parents and their dog, set against a vague and distant backdrop of the coming Second World War, throws little light upon a universe without much meaning, though it is in the nature of McCarthy characters to try to anyway. In the end, when the last dog is hanged, so to speak, what survives is the rhythm of McCarthy's open, ropey sentences circling a logic as inscrutable as an animal's or a god's. Although no mysteries are solved, and no comfort gained for these lonely characters, there is that language wrestling to earth all that it cannot know and all that it can. Readers again will be in awe of McCarthy's extraordinary prose attentions--the biblical cadences, the freshened vocabulary, the taut, vivid renderings of the struggle to live. 200,000 first printing; BOMC main selection.

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  • English

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