Recommendations
Books Like All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
For readers of McCarthy's romantic Border Trilogy opener
If you loved All the Pretty Horses's elegiac portrait of John Grady Cole, his extraordinary connection with horses, and his doomed love for Alejandra, these books continue the Border Trilogy or explore the Western literary tradition the novel belongs to.
- 1
Buy on AmazonThe Crossing
by Cormac McCarthy
The Border Trilogy's second volume — Billy Parham's three journeys into Mexico; more meditative and philosophical than All the Pretty Horses, the companion in McCarthy's border landscape and preoccupations.
- 2
Buy on AmazonCities of the Plain
by Cormac McCarthy
The Border Trilogy's conclusion — John Grady Cole and Billy Parham together; the convergence of the trilogy's two protagonists and the elegiac ending of McCarthy's examination of the dying West.
- 3
Buy on AmazonNo Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's most accessible other major novel — the companion in his West Texas/Mexico setting; where All the Pretty Horses is romantic and elegiac, No Country is forensic and nihilistic, and comparing them shows McCarthy's full range.
- 4
Buy on AmazonBlood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's most extreme major novel — the essential companion for understanding what he is doing when he romanticizes the border; the Judge's historical violence is what John Grady Cole is the twilight elegist of.
- 5
Buy on AmazonLonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's Pulitzer-winning Western — the companion in the American Western literary tradition; Call and McCrae's cattle drive is the epic version of the elegiac Western story that All the Pretty Horses tells in a more intimate register.
- 6
Buy on AmazonFor Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's Spanish Civil War novel — the formal predecessor in the romantic-masculine mode; John Grady Cole's Mexico is McCarthy's version of Hemingway's Spain, and both novels are about a young man who goes to a foreign country and encounters love and violence in equal measure.
- 7
Buy on AmazonThe Old Gringo
by Carlos Fuentes
Fuentes's historical novel — the companion in Latin American fiction about the intersection of American and Mexican cultures; the old gringo's journey into revolutionary Mexico is the Mexican-literary-fiction companion to John Grady Cole's journey.
- 8
Buy on AmazonOuter Dark
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's second novel — the Southern Gothic predecessor; reading All the Pretty Horses against Outer Dark reveals how deliberately McCarthy constructed the romantic mode of the Border Trilogy as a counterweight to the darkness of his earlier work.
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