{"product_id":"stella-maris-isbn-9780307269003","title":"Stella Maris","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eNEW YORK TIMES\u003c\/i\u003e BEST SELLER \u003cb\u003e• T\u003c\/b\u003ehe second volume of The Passenger series, from \u003cb\u003eThe Pulitzer Prize–winning author of \u003ci\u003eThe Road\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cb\u003e• An\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence.\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\"\u003c\/i\u003eThe richest and strongest work of McCarthy’s career…An achievement greater than \u003ci\u003eBlood Meridian\u003c\/i\u003e…or…\u003ci\u003eThe Road\u003c\/i\u003e.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, \u003ci\u003eStella Maris \u003c\/i\u003eis a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to \u003ci\u003eThe Passenger,\u003c\/i\u003e a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.“[\u003ci\u003eStella Maris\u003c\/i\u003e] is a Tom Stoppardesque bull session. Does it work? Uh-huh. Does it work more fully if you’ve already read \u003ci\u003eThe Passenger\u003c\/i\u003e? Absolutely…\u003ci\u003eStella Maris\u003c\/i\u003e is…[an] elegiac novel. It’s best read while you are still buzzing from the previous book. Its themes are dark ones, and yet it brings you home, like the piano coda at the end of “Layla.” No one in the real world talks the way Alicia does — she’s seeing with her third eye, flexing her middle finger at the world, rocking her family’s thundersome legacy — but they might if they could. She lays down…cataclysmic one-liners…All this is cut with humor…The most moving moments in \u003ci\u003eStella Maris\u003c\/i\u003e braid [Alicia’s] feelings for her brother, which go through her like a spear, with a sense of intellectual futility. Reading \u003ci\u003eStella Maris\u003c\/i\u003e after \u003ci\u003eThe Passenger \u003c\/i\u003eis like trying to hang onto a dream you’ve been having. It’s an uncanny, unsettling dream, tuned into the static of the universe.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e —Dwight Garner, \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"In the new pair of novels...a fresh space is made to enable the exchange of ideas, and the rhetorical consequences are felt in the very textures of the fiction....[McCarthy's] ear for dialogue has always been impeccable; in these novels...people think and speak rationally, mundanely, intelligently, crazily, as they do in real life...And along with the excellent dialogue there are scores of lovely noticings, often of the natural world....Authoritatively eloquent.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e —James Wood, \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e\"\u003c\/i\u003eCormac McCarthy has never been better…The booming, omnipotent narrative voice, which first appeared in McCarthy’s Western novels of the 1980s...has ebbed almost entirely in these books…What remain are human voices, which is to say characters, contending with one another and with their own fears and regrets, as they face the prospect of the godless void that awaits them. The result is…pleasurable, and together the books are the richest and strongest work of McCarthy’s career…McCarthy’s latest…novels represent a return to human concerns, but ones—love, death, guilt, illusion—experienced and scrutinized on the highest existential plane…As a pair,\u003ci\u003e The Passenger \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003e Stella Maris \u003c\/i\u003eare an achievement greater than \u003ci\u003eBlood Meridian\u003c\/i\u003e…or…\u003ci\u003eThe Road…\u003c\/i\u003eIn the new novels, McCarthy again sets bravery and ingenuity loose amid inhumanity….The results are not weakly flickering. They are incandescent with life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e —Graeme Wood,\u003ci\u003e The Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"If \u003ci\u003e[Stella Maris and The Passenger] \u003c\/i\u003eend up being McCarthy’s epitaph, we can say he went out with a majestic shudder in keeping with his best work. They echo not just his own greatest hits but a pantheon of American literature: the baroque language and sentence structure of Faulkner; the terse, laconic dialogue of Hemingway; even the paranoid poetry of DeLillo....McCarthy’s world remains no country for resolution, except for the inevitable one that concludes six feet under. In the meantime, the horizon is obscured by the darkening rim of the world.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e —Chris Vognar,\u003ci\u003e The Boston Globe \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"A deep dive into psychological dysfunction and a further inquiry into the mechanics of existence —inasmuch as that can be understood....Thrilling.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e —David L. Ulin, \u003ci\u003eThe Los Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"[\u003ci\u003eStella Maris\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Passenger\u003c\/i\u003e] illuminate each other, and yet the relation between them is no easier to define than one between actual breathing people....\u003ci\u003eStella Maris\u003c\/i\u003e is...rigorously structured...Electrifying...McCarthy’s language has all the richness of the King James Bible, its cadences slow and forever beautiful and forever at odds with the world it describes....I felt like crying myself as I approached the end of \u003ci\u003eStella Maris\u003c\/i\u003e, the end of this dark enthralling pair.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e —Michael Gorra, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “With the publication of \u003ci\u003eThe Passenger \u003c\/i\u003eand its companion novel \u003ci\u003eStella Maris\u003c\/i\u003e, McCarthy seems to be done mining the myth of America. Instead, he ponders what it means to exist, and what our history tells us about our future… He digs into the big ideas of the universe, like human existence and what it means, as well as what our history and memory mean. He’s searching for something different… Where other writers venture into the mind and soul, McCarthy has leapt past that to ask what a soul is—and if it even exists…McCarthy is no longer searching in the dirt trail across the West and saying, ‘This is it. This is our human nature.’ In \u003ci\u003eThe Passenger\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eStella Maris\u003c\/i\u003e, he’s trying to see the God that made the man who wrote those words.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e —Kevin Koczwara, \u003ci\u003eEsquire\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"[\u003ci\u003eStella Maris \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Passenger \u003c\/i\u003eare] as bold and intellectually keen as anything the author’s ever written.... [\u003ci\u003eStella Maris\u003c\/i\u003e] really shines....Alicia is a singular creation, an incomparable genius who actually reads like one on the page....Readers looking for answers to the questions raised by \u003ci\u003eThe Passenger \u003c\/i\u003ewon’t find them here\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003eonly more questions, more pieces of an unsolvable equation McCarthy is posing about the universe and our place in it.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Barbara VanDenburgh, \u003ci\u003eUSA Today\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Sometimes I think the reason literary criticism got obsessed with evaluating prose as ‘sentences’ over the past few decades is simply that McCarthy’s are so good. They rattle out at you like little bullets, mean and punchy and precise… Taken together, [\u003ci\u003eThe Passenger \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eStella Maris\u003c\/i\u003e] offer an intellectual experience that’s not quite like anything else out there, laced with the eerie beauty that only Cormac McCarthy can offer.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e —Constance Grady, \u003ci\u003eVox\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"[A] masterpiece...The new books are ambitious, impressively different from [McCarthy's] previous work. They are structured with great elegance and originality, funny, at times surprisingly (and terrifyingly) light—and layered with enough puzzles and resonances to occupy a reader indefinitely. This work may be McCarthy’s greatest. It is the product of a writer at the peak of his powers taking his most explicit approach to his lifelong themes...The chronological loop between the two books is beautiful in itself, and the cockeyed structure is like nothing I have encountered in literature.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e —Valerie Stivers,\u003ci\u003e Compact\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"As a window into a great writer’s intellectual preoccupations, \u003ci\u003eStella Maris \u003c\/i\u003eis invaluable... \u003ci\u003eStella Maris\u003c\/i\u003e is... a neat mirror of \u003ci\u003eThe Passenger\u003c\/i\u003e: It fills in gaps in Bobby’s story and shows us the siblings’ shared history from Alicia’s point of view. In \u003ci\u003eThe Passenger\u003c\/i\u003e, Alicia is a cipher—all the more intriguing for being inaccessible to the reader. In \u003ci\u003eStella Maris\u003c\/i\u003e, McCarthy lifts the veil on his mysterious creation.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e —Maggie Doherty, \u003ci\u003eThe New Republic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “[McCarthy] reigns as a titan of American lit—an undisputed heir to Melville and Faulkner, the subject of infinite grad-school theses, and a hard-nosed dispenser of what Saul Bellow called ‘life-giving and death-dealing’ sentences... It's the humid, fevered, magniloquent, Bible-cadenced, comma-starved, word-drunk prose of what some fans consider his masterwork, \u003ci\u003eSuttree\u003c\/i\u003e... There's a lot here. It might make your head spin... What it all adds up to—perhaps surprisingly—is a doomed and unsettling love story, a Platonic tragedy.... Electric and thunderous… An astonishing pair of novels… Taken together, \u003ci\u003eThe Passenger\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eStella Maris\u003c\/i\u003e are an intellectually breathtaking achievement.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e –Jonathan Miles, \u003ci\u003eGarden \u0026amp; Gun\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “At 89, [McCarthy is] still riffing, like a jazz virtuoso, on the American Nightmare, Faulkner’s mythmaking, and the cadences of Joyce. McCarthy’s flame burns bright and clear in two new works…\u003ci\u003eThe Passenger, \u003c\/i\u003ewondrous in its architecture, and a companion piece, \u003ci\u003eStella Maris, \u003c\/i\u003ea minimalist, edgy novella…McCarthy toggles between books and across decades, sketching the contours of a love that dare not say its name. McCarthy’s art is transcendent even as it takes no prisoners, an achievement akin only to the oeuvres of his greatest peers, Toni Morrison and Philip Roth. He will endure.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e —\u003ci\u003eOprah Daily\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Like [Bob] Dylan, McCarthy fashions the country as a cast-iron, biblical land where grand themes play out in vast landscapes around lonely, small people. You can practically hear the rusty gate swaying in the wind, everything made of leather, mud, or simmering flesh. Most of us imagine life as a high-wire act with oneself as the acrobat, but McCarthy acknowledges it as a bridge, an ordinary path of extraordinary consequence with a beginning, an end, and an edge most men don’t ever tempt…The language in \u003ci\u003eThe Passenger\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eStella Maris\u003c\/i\u003e is compelling and soulful, even when the voice sounds sharp. Amid…talk of mathematics and wickedness and hideous ruination, there is poetry and the rhythm of song. Sheddan’s lines alone are worth the price of admission, such as when he says humans are ‘ten percent biology and ninety percent nightrumor,’ and that ‘every remedy for loneliness only postpones it.’”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e —Nathan King,\u003ci\u003e Air Mail\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"A deeply prodding and inwardly focused novel about a young woman who admits herself to a psychiatric hospital in 1972. Whereas \u003ci\u003eThe Passenger\u003c\/i\u003e echoes some of the raw adrenaline-spiking aspects of McCarthy’s past works,\u003ci\u003e Stella Maris\u003c\/i\u003e is a largely philosophical endeavor written entirely in dialogue. The result is a more-than-welcome addition to this prolific author’s bibliography.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e —\u003ci\u003eChicago Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “\u003ci\u003eThe Passenger\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eStella Maris\u003c\/i\u003e tackle dazzlingly fresh ground…McCarthy’s daring has not dimmed since The Road, and The Passenger and Stella Maris pull no punches as they explore the craggiest regions of human consciousness through two of McCarthy’s most vividly drawn characters… McCarthy’s writing retains the tangible gristle of a field guide, full of the organic solidity and exacting diction that have helped solidify his reputation… Read together, \u003ci\u003eThe Passenger\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eStella Maris \u003c\/i\u003eare a fascinating diptych, bringing light and depth to each other. The mysteries and coincidences are legion, and mirrored moments are plentiful...McCarthy’s writing pursues a sublime and majestic undercurrent weaving through the dark waves of chaos...he results are staggering.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e —Seth L. Riley, \u003ci\u003eThe Millions\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A…beautifully rendered meditation on humanity’s relationship to nature… McCarthy, perhaps the most lyrical poet of slaughter since Homer, is at his most biblical and elegiac describing the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki… \u003ci\u003eThe Passenger \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eStella Maris \u003c\/i\u003etogether form a profound addition to the legacy of a true literary savant.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e —Ed Tarkington, \u003ci\u003eChapter 16\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “[McCarthy] rockets readers into the black hole at the hub of his galactic imagination, an event horizon so rich and dense we can only marvel as we fall through its warped fabric….Like Moses, McCarthy seeks a land of milk and honey beyond the rim of the universe but spies only oblivion (and perhaps the ghostly glow of math)… Despite the darkness ahead, \u003ci\u003eThe Passenger\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eStella Maris\u003c\/i\u003e crown a magnificent career that will guide us forward, for as long as the lights stay on.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e —Hamilton Cain, \u003ci\u003eStar Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"The relationship between [\u003ci\u003eStella Maris \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Passenger\u003c\/i\u003e], and between the two siblings, is analogous to the concept of quantum entanglement: God and physics, faith and reason are all connected, but it’ll blow your mind if you try to understand how....McCarthy’s superpowers [are] his perfect ear for the southern American voice, his exceptional ability to reveal character through speech, his masterful writing about nature. And his humor.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Spectator World\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"McCarthy delivers some of his best work in scenes that you both expect...and don’t....The story McCarthy has told so far leaves the reader pondering some of life’s deepest questions, and affirms that McCarthy’s command of his writing — and our attention — is as good as ever.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e —Geoff Smith, \u003ci\u003eThe Berkshire Eagle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"A companion to McCarthy’s \u003ci\u003eThe Passenger \u003c\/i\u003ethat both supplements and subverts it… Enigmatic… A grand puzzle, and grandly written at that, about shattered psyches and illicit dreams.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e —\u003ci\u003eKirkus Review, \u003c\/i\u003eStarred Review\u003c\/b\u003eThe novels of the American writer, Cormac McCarthy, have received a number of literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His works adapted to film include \u003ci\u003eAll the Pretty Horses, The Road,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eNo Country for Old Men—\u003c\/i\u003ethe latter film receiving four Academy Awards, including the award for Best Picture\u003ci\u003e. \u003c\/i\u003eHe died in 2023.","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299931443429,"sku":"NP9780307269003","price":26.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307269003.jpg?v=1767737299","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/stella-maris-isbn-9780307269003","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}