The Crossing (Volume Two, The Border Trilogy) First Edition 1994

Cormac McCarthy

ISBN 10: 0394574753 / ISBN 13: 9780394574752

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1994

About this Item

Good / Good. First Edition, Stated. Previous owner name & date to front flyleaf, else unmarked. 1994. Alfred A. Knopf; NY. Hardcover. Good: black cloth spine over dark grey paper boards; gold stamped CM monogram to front cover, gold stamped title & author lettering to spine. Light shelf wear, minor corner rubbing. Binding tight, solid & square. Good dust jacket, unclipped $23.00. Light tanning along upper margins, faint surface soiling; light corner & edge wear, minor rubbing to spine ends & fold tips; else clean & bright. Light even tanning to text block edges & interior pages. Red tinted top edge unmarred; deckled fore-edge. 425 pp. Jacket design by Chip Kidd. Octavo. Second volume of the Border Trilogy, between All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain, tracing sixteen-year-old Billy Parham from New Mexico into the mountains of Mexico. Ships in a box, quickly & w/care. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ SYNOPSIS & HISTORY: Originally published in 1994 by Alfred A. Knopf, The Crossing is the central volume of Cormac McCarthy's acclaimed Border Trilogy. Set in Hidalgo County, New Mexico, and the mountain wilderness of northern Mexico in the years around 1940, the narrative centers on sixteen-year-old Billy Parham following his capture of a pregnant she-wolf preying on his family's ranch. Resolving to return the animal to her native range, Billy leads her on an arduous trek across the Mexican border. Upon his return, he finds his home destroyed, his parents killed, and their horses stolen, prompting Billy and his younger brother Boyd to undertake a second journey into Mexico to reclaim their family property amidst a changing, violent landscape. Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023) earned widespread recognition as a master of modern American prose, receiving the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses and the Pulitzer Prize for The Road. In The Crossing, McCarthy explores themes of fate, human endurance, and ecological tragedy through a prose style that balances Biblical cadence against detailed observations of the natural world. The novel is the connective narrative between All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain. The Border Trilogy runs from All the Pretty Horses (1992) through The Crossing (1994) to Cities of the Plain (1998). The Knopf jacket carries graphic design by Chip Kidd.

Seller Inventory # C0Gg-Au081726G12

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Crossing (Volume Two, The Border Trilogy) First Edition 1994
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York
• Publication Date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0394574753
• ISBN 13: 9780394574752
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Chip Kidd; Melanie Acevedo
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: GOOD
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Weight: 49 ounces
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature
  • First & Collectable Editions
  • Fiction

About this title

Synopsis

Following All the Pretty Horses in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy is a novel whose force of language is matched only by its breadth of experience and depth of thought.

In the bootheel of New Mexico hard on the frontier, Billy and Boyd Parham are just boys in the years before the Second World War, but on the cusp of unimaginable events. First comes a trespassing Indian and the dream of wolves running wild amongst the cattle lately brought onto the plain by settlers -- this when all the wisdom of trappers has disappeared along with the trappers themselves. And so Billy sets forth at the age of sixteen on an unwitting journey into the souls of boys and animals and men. Having trapped a she-wolf he would restore to the mountains of Mexico, he is long gone and returns to find everything he left behind transformed utterly in his absence. Except his kid brother, Boyd, with whom he strikes out yet again to reclaim what is theirs thus crossing into "that antique gaze from whence there could be no way back forever."

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.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

About the Author

Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island in1933 and spent most of his childhood near Knoxville, Tennessee. He served in the U.S. Air Force and later studied at the University of Tennessee. In 1976 he moved to El Paso, Texas, where he lives today.  McCarthy's fiction parallels his movement from the Southeast to the West--the first four novels being set in Tennessee, the last three in the Southwest and Mexico. The Orchard Keeper (1965) won the Faulkner Award for a first novel; it was followed by Outer Dark (1968),  Child of God (1973), Suttree (1979), Blood Meridian (1985), and All the Pretty Horses, which won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for fiction in 1992. The Crossing is his seventh novel and the second in McCarthy's Border Trilogy.


From the Trade Paperback edition.