Tom McCarthy, Author . Vintage $13.95 (308p) ISBN 978-0-307-27835-7
McCarthy's debut novel, set in London, takes a clever conceit and pumps it up with vibrant prose to such great effect that the narrative's pointlessness is nearly a nonissue. The unnamed narrator, who suffers memory loss as the result of an...
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Tom McCarthy , Knopf, $26.95 (312p) ISBN 978-0-307-59333-7
Remainder established McCarthy as a contemporary champion of the experimental novel and heir to the postmodern stylists of the late 20th century, but it's difficult to come up with a suitable thematic or stylistic precursor to his unclassifiably...
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Tom McCarthy. Knopf, $24 (192p) ISBN 978-0-307-59395-5
McCarthy’s newest novel is as delightfully unclassifiable as his last effort, C. The narrator is U., a fanciful and probing anthropologist who works for a corporation he refers to simply as “the Company.” Recruited as an ethnographer on the...
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Tom McCarthy. Diaphanes (Univ. of Chicago, dist.), $12.95 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-3-03-734589-4
"The time of fiction" is "the interim," according to McCarthy (Satin Island) in this slim book of literary criticism. Drawing primarily on modernist works as well as his own books, McCarthy describes a suspended interval, or a "recessional time"...
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Tom McCarthy. New York Review Books, $17.95 trade paper (288p) ISBN 978-1-68137-086-6
Reviewed by Gabe Habash
The final sentence of McCarthy’s first essay collection is, “It might just be that the final measure of a writer is not so much what they achieve themselves as what they render possible for others.” It’s a wonderful idea, and
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Tom McCarthy, read by Stephan Hoye, Tantor Media, unabridged, 11 CDs, 14 hrs., $37.99 ISBN 978-1-4001-1812-0
McCarthy’s third novel hopscotches between a marvelously diverse chain of times and places—from the British countryside to Egypt, from the 1920s to the turn of the 21st century. It’s an overstuffed historical novel that is also an experimental...
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Tom McCarthy, read by James Langton. Tantor Media, unabridged, seven CDs, 8.5 hrs., $34.99 ISBN 978-1-4526-0010-9
Langton summons an impressive array of voices in his charmingly comic rendition of McCarthy's kaleidoscopic novel of transformation, including gruff Scotsmen, simpering Americans, and the deceptively reasonable-sounding protagonist who guides us...
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Tom McCarthy. Vintage, $15 trade paper (304p) ISBN 978-0-307-38822-3
Recalling Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, but with a stolen painting substituting for sex, McCarthy’s early novel, set in 1990s Prague, follows a purloined religious icon as it passes through the lives of Anton, a Bulgarian football referee turned...
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Tom McCarthy. Knopf, $28 (336p) ISBN 978-0-593-31987-1
McCarthy’s acclaimed previous novels all revealed a fascination with spatial diametrics and information theory, and the intricately calibrated latest (after Satin Island) soars even further from plot and character conventions with a study of motion,
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