PORTICO LITERARY QUARTERLY: The latest issue features….

Cormac McCarthy’s Desert Wanderings

By Michael Crews

Tracy Daugherty’s biography of Cormac McCarthy is a landmark publication. Putting together the life of a writer who not only shunned publicity but actively worked to keep fans, journalists, the media, and academics off his trail requires the powers of both a skilled biographer and a nosy private detective. In that latter role, some of what Daugherty has uncovered is unsavory, though with the recent revelation of McCarthy’s relationship with Augusta Britt, who was sixteen when they began an affair, readers may be prepared for some of the shocks. One of Daugherty’s leitmotifs is McCarthy the “bad boy” and “outlaw,” and though such appellations risk cliché, the story he tells is of a man who, at least in the first half of his life, preferred the company of moonshiners, gamblers, hard drinkers, and petty criminals like his old Knoxville pal John Sheddan, who seems to have been the Falstaff to McCarthy’s Prince Hal.

Jean Toomer in Black and White

Helen Andrews

There are two books before me, which, if I mistake not, will mark an epoch,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois in The Crisis magazine in 1924. One was a novel of middle-class African-American life by Jessie Fauset called There Is Confusion. The other was a collection of stories, songs, poems, and character sketches called…

Andre Dubus’s Sacramental Fictions

Christopher J. Scalia

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, few writers were more admired by peers and critics than Andre Dubus. But because Dubus’s territory was the relatively confined space of the short story and novella, he never enjoyed great commercial success or recognition. Dubus was destined to be a writer’s writer—what Joshua Bodwell calls a…

The Cello

By Lionel Shriver

In that we’ve been married for sixteen years, you really don’t have to try so hard to make your feelings known,” Janet said at the wheel. “I’m well aware you don’t want to do this.”

“I THINK I’ve been pretty stoic about it,” Rick said, eyes to the thick woods he’d be reflexively scanning for deer. Ever since they’d planted an ambitious garden behind their upstate New York summerhouse, the creatures that had once seemed so exquisite had become evil incarnate.

“Stoic? More like long-suffering,” Janet said. “You’ve hardly said a word the whole way here. But there’s no point in having joined Saint Peter’s if we don’t put our beliefs into practice. Charity doesn’t only mean parting with twenty bucks to get someone at the door to go away. It means sometimes doing what’s right when you don’t feel like it.”