Since 2022, McCarthy held the post of Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute, alongside Ted Chiang and Andrea Wulf.
[4] Prior to moving to Berlin, he lived and wrote in a tower block flat on the Golden Lane Estate beside the Barbican.
Killian Fox in The Observer praised "its author's obsessive approach, his breathtaking grasp of the oeuvre and the sheer exuberance with which he tackles his subject".
[14] However, in The Guardian, Kathryn Hughes criticised its methodology and style: "McCarthy's text has that pleased-with-itself smirk that was so characteristic of the early 90s, when journalists started purloining critical theory from the academy, liking the way it made them feel clever".
[17] McCarthy has also published numerous stories, essays and articles on literature, philosophy and art in publications including The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Artforum, and The New York Times., as well as in anthologies such as London from Punk to Blair (Reaktion Books), Theology and the Political (Duke University Press), The Milgram Reenactment (Jan van Eyck Press) and The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth (Serpent's Tail).
[18] In February 2015 McCarthy published a new novel titled Satin Island which was shortlisted for that year's Man Booker Prize; when he began it, he said, "It's going to have a leitmotif of a parachutist falling to earth, having realised that his parachute has been sabotaged: his relation to the landscape, death, technology.
[20] Since 1999 McCarthy has been 'general secretary' of a 'semi-fictitious organisation' he co-founded with his friend[21] the philosopher Simon Critchley[22] called the International Necronautical Society (INS) "devoted to mind-bending projects that would do for death what the Surrealists had done for sex".
[24][25] McCarthy handed out his International Necronautical Society or INS manifestos at a mock art fair organised by artist Gavin Turk.
[3] The INS has been described by Art Monthly as "a group of wayward literati and sweet-talking parodists",[28] and as "obscure" by The Australian.
[32] Taking his claim as an inspiration, McCarthy and Critchley did indeed replace themselves with actors when delivering the Declaration one year later at Tate Britain.
[35] In 2006 he collaborated with French artist Loris Gréaud to produce an 'Ontic Helpline' for a fictitious 'Thanatalogical Corporation' – a black telephone that transfers callers through an endless loop of pre-recorded messages.
The script consists of a short story, loosely based on Borges's '25 August 1983', in which Hitchcock meets his double on the set of one of his films.
The first novel, Remainder (2005), tells the story of an unnamed hero traumatised by an accident which "involved something falling from the sky".
Eight and a half million pounds richer due to a compensation settlement but hopelessly estranged from the world around him, Remainder's protagonist spends his time and money obsessively reconstructing and re-enacting vaguely remembered scenes and situations from his past, such as a large building with piano music in the distance, the familiar smells and sounds of liver frying and spluttering, or lethargic cats lounging on roofs until they tumble off them.
These re-enactments are driven by a need to inhabit the world "authentically" rather than in the "second-hand" manner that his traumatic situation has bequeathed him.
Set in a Central Europe rapidly fragmenting after the fall of Communism, Men in Space follows a cast of dissolute Bohemians, political refugees, football referees, deaf police agents, assassins and stranded astronauts as they chase a stolen icon painting from Sofia to Prague and beyond.
The icon's melancholy orbit is reflected in the various characters' ellipses and near-misses as they career vertiginously through all kinds of space, be it physical, political, emotional or metaphysical.
[37] Opening in England at the turn of the twentieth century, C is the story of a boy named Serge Carrefax, whose father spends his time experimenting with wireless communication while running a school for deaf children.
After a fling with a nurse at a Bohemian spa, Serge serves in World War I as a radio operator for reconnaissance planes.
[28][49] Boyd Tonkin, in his Independent profile on McCarthy, picks up on the notion that literature itself is a series of repetitions and duplications.
[56] McCarthy created an art project around Cocteau's Orphée, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2004, which consisted of forty assistants cutting up text, projecting it onto the walls and then re-assembling it into cryptic messages which were transmitted around London and the world by radio and internet.