PRAISE FOR ISOLATO:

"My brother Cormac McCarthy was a fan of Laurence Gonzales's work, so I asked him to write this biography. If you want to meet the real Cormac, you've come to the right place."
—Dennis McCarthy, author of The Gospel According to Billy the Kid.

"Laurence Gonzales has pulled off an astonishing trick with Isolato, a portrait of McCarthy that reveals a great deal about an uncompromising artist who, as the title suggests, was a very hard man to know. This is a book that is personal, endlessly engrossing, and—most of all—honest."
—Dr. Stacey Peebles, President, The Cormac McCarthy Society and H. W. Stodghill, Jr. and Adele H. Stodghill Professor of English, Centre College.

"Once a Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute where Cormac McCarthy was in residence, Laurence Gonzales gives us in Isolato a fascinating memoir of his friend, providing a wealth of new information and insights based on their conversations as well as interviews with family and friends. I read it non-stop and will return to it often.  Both scholars and general readers of McCarthy, a towering figure of American literature, will want Isolato on their bookshelves."
—Dianne C. Luce, author of Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy's Tennessee Period and Embracing Vocation: Cormac McCarthy's Writing Life, 1959-1974. Founding member and past president of the Cormac McCarthy Society.

"I distinctly remember Cormac McCarthy’s work arriving from what seemed like another planet three decades ago, and Laurence Gonzales’s biography is the only thing missing from my decades-long obsession with this man. Surely there’s an explanation for something this brilliant, this unheard of, I kept thinking. Well, here it is. One could never conjure a figure like McCarthy, so a book was desperately needed to explain him to us, and I can’t imagine a better one than this. As a close friend of McCarthy’s and a terrific writer in his own right, Gonzales was the perfect person for the task, and: simultaneously desperate for more and terrified it would end. Thank God Gonzales came along to put all us McCarthy fans out of our misery."
—Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm.