The artist, Robert Josiah Bingaman, actually made two for DFW. Here's the other. (Via)

It’s possibly the greatest American novel of the past 25 years. It is unique. Blood Meridian is amazing, because it’s so rigid in its outlook, so committed to its vision, that it does not care about the conflict of the reader who, if sane, has to be uncomfortable.... What is most uncomfortable for the reader is that there’s no space in the book from which you can judge it, no space into which the reader could step to protect himself or herself from this world – there are no good guys. Of course, you can close the book and go away, but there’s one scene of a massacre of Indians that is one continuous sentence for a couple of pages. If the sentence ends, or if it’s broken up into little sentences you could quit after, you know, the 25th sentence, but they are strung together paratactically, and you ride on in the sentence. 

There’s also to my mind the most amazing character in American fiction in the 20th century: the Judge, who provides theories that justify the world in which these men operate. Also what I like about it is that it entirely blocks the kind of reading that is based on empathy. You cannot identify ethically or morally, or even intellectually or psychologically, with any of the characters. There’s no expression of emotion, no interiority: those men act, and when they act, they act violently. It desensitises you; not because you don’t care, but because the violence is a part of a larger plan. It is not a question of individual agency but rather of the state of the world, or the underlying laws that govern the world. 

Alex Ross is writing another book. His first was terrific.

From "Flat #1 by Ecole" at the Contemporist, where several more photos await.

I dreamed. I was reading Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, and there's a passage where the hero, lazing on his river boat on a hot summer day, pulls up a string from the water with a bottle of orange soda attached to it and drinks. I tasted that pop so clearly I can taste it today. Later he's served a beer in a frosted mug. I don't drink beer, but the frosted mug evoked for me a long-buried memory of my father and I driving in his old Plymouth to the A&W Root Beer stand (gravel driveways, carhop service, window trays) and his voice saying "...and a five-cent beer for the boy." The smoke from his Lucky Strike in the car. The heavy summer heat.

For nights I would wake up already focused on that small but heavy glass mug with the ice sliding from it, and the first sip of root beer. I took that sip over and over. The ice slid down across my fingers again and again. But never again.

Without The Four Books on Architecture of Palladio no one would have cared about Palladio. A book lasts longer than a building: books are more important in the world than buildings. Without Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture there would be no Bob Venturi. Without Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York there would be no Koolhaas. Without Le Corbusier's Toward an Architecture, etcetera. That's why I have them on my top ten list. The books that I mentioned in the list made those architects. Without those books, they wouldn't exist for us. So for me, architects live beyond their time through the book.

Visit Yale University Press' site to watch a video preview of this small but handsome volume (which, sadly, must now return to the libraries' shelves, not ours).