Shelfology Book Pairing

Or the Evening Redness in the West

by Cormac McCarthy

25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

With an Introduction by Mary Gaitskill

by Vladimir Nabokov

'One of the greatest books I've ever read. Its heart is strange, but it is huge; let yours beat in response' MARY GAITSKILL Pale Fire, a 999-line poem, is the final work of the celebrated - and recently murdered - American author, John Francis Shade. Here that poem is transcribed, introduced and annotated (at length) by Shade's fellow scholar, neighbour and apparent friend, Charles Kinbote. Approaching this task with gusto, Kinbote's annotations reveal conclusive evidence of his own impact on Shade, disguised references to the northern land of Zembla, which he may or may not have once ruled over, and fuel for his many preoccupations and paranoia. And - as his annotations become more desperate, more deluded, more deranged - Kinbote unintentionally sheds new light on the poet's last days and the pair's 'glorious friendship'. A murder mystery, a work of wild invention, a reimagining of what the novel can do, a piece of exquisite comedy, Pale Fire is widely regarded as Nabokov's masterpiece and one of the most brilliant novels ever written. A W&N Essential with an introduction from Mary Gaitskill