In 2004 he published an essay on excrement in the work of James Joyce in the online literary journal "Hypermedia Joyce Studies". In 2008 an essay by McCarthy on Alain Robbe-Grillet, an author he has often expressed an admiration for, was published in the new Oneworld Classics English edition of Robbe-Grillet's "Jealousy". 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."