Peter Josyph – författare

Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s brilliant and challenging work demands deep engagement from his readers. In Cormac McCarthy’s House, author, painter, photographer, and actor-director Peter Josyph draws on a wide range of experience to pose provocative, unexpected questions about McCarthy’s work, how it is achieved, and how it is interpreted.As a visual artist, Josyph wrestles with the challenge of rendering McCarthy’s former home in El Paso as a symbol of a great writer’s workshop. As an actor and filmmaker, he analyzes the high art of Tommy Lee Jones in The Sunset Limited and No Country for Old Men. Invoking the recent suicide of a troubled friend, he grapples with the issue of “our brother’s keeper” in The Crossing and The Sunset Limited. But for Josyph, reading the finest prose-poet of our day is a project into which he invites many voices, and his investigations include a talk with Mark Morrow about photographing McCarthy while he was writing Blood Meridian; an in-depth conversation with director Tom Cornford on the challenges of staging The Sunset Limited and The Stonemason; a walk through the streets, waterfronts, and hidden haunts of Suttree with McCarthy scholar and Knoxville resident Wesley Morgan; insights from the cast of The Gardener’s Son about a controversial scene in that film; actress Miriam Colon’s perspective on portraying the DueÑa Alfonsa opposite Matt Damon in All the Pretty Horses; and a harsh critique of Josyph’s views on The Crossing by McCarthy scholar Marty Priola, which leads to a sometimes heated debate. Illustrated with thirty-one photographs, Josyph’s unconventional journeys into the genius of Cormac McCarthy form a new, highly personal way of appreciating literary greatness.

Regarded by many as one of America's finest-living writers, Cormac McCarthy has produced some of the most compelling novels of the last 40 years. Through the increasing number of cinematic adaptations of his work, including the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, and the Pulitzer Prize for The Road, McCarthy is entering the mainstream of cultural consciousness, both in the United States and abroad. In Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy, Peter Josyph considers, at length, the author's two masterworks Blood Meridian and Suttree, as well as the novel and film of All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy's play The Stonemason, and his film The Gardener's Son.The book also includes extended conversations with critic Harold Bloom about Blood Meridian; novelist and poet Robert Morgan about The Gardener's Son; critic Rick Wallach about Blood Meridian; and Oscar-winning screenwriter Ted Tally about his film adaptation of All the Pretty Horses. Drawing on multiple resources of an unconventional nature, this book examines McCarthy's work from original and sometimes provocative perspectives. Proposing a new notion of criticism, Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy will become a useful tool for critics, students, and general readers about one of the great literary talents of the day.

A lively and intimate selection of letters on life, literature, and art from one of America's finest prose stylists.In 1988, when author and former surgeon Richard Selzer answered a letter from Peter Josyph, a New York artist he had met, he did not know that he was embarking on the most enduring correspondence of his life. In thousands of letters, written in longhand over the course of two decades, Selzer devoted himself to the epistolary art-an art that, even among writers, has become increasingly rare in an age of cell phones, e-mails, and text messaging. "Letters are definitely a genre," Selzer says, "and I think it's one of the best." As this lively and intimate collection demonstrates, Richard Selzer is one of its master practitioners.In spontaneous, conversational style, Selzer writes about his life and work with the unpredictable vision and sharpness of wit that, in his stories, memoirs, and personal essays, have made his reputation as one of the great prose stylists of his day. It is also the record of a friendship. As Peter Josyph remarks in his introduction, "With a good correspondence, as with the blowing between horn players improvising off each other's riffs, it isn't easy to say whether it's art or society because it is both of them at once. This is a book about two men who value a friendship balanced upon words; men for whose friendship the phone is a thief; men who are comfortable with the U.S. mail."