Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer-winning The Road follows a father and his young son pushing a shopping cart south through a dead, ash-gray America. Stripped to almost nothing, it's a post-apocalyptic novel that turns survival into a meditation on love, and ranks among the most quietly devastating books of the century.

Blood Meridian is Cormac McCarthy's savage, biblical anti-western: the story of a runaway boy who falls in with a band of scalp-hunters on the 1850s borderlands, rendered in prose of almost unbearable beauty and violence. It's a landmark of American literature, and not for the faint of heart.