Cormac McCarthy looking rugged. Image via The Quarterly Conversation.

Despite reports to the contrary, Pulitzer-prize winning author Cormac McCarthy is “alive and well.” And he “still doesn’t give a crap about Twitter.”

Earlier this week, Italian prankster Tommaso Debendetti tweeted “URGENT: Author Cormac McCarthy dies for stroke at 82” [sic] under the handle @AKnopfNews. (For the record, McCarthy’s publisher, Penguin Random House imprint Alfred A. Knopf, is @AAKnopf.)

USA Today then retweeted the news themselves just after 7:00 am on Tuesday morning, and by the time Knopf’s publicity director Paul Bogaards arrived at his office, Entertainment Weekly was asking for a comment.

“I started getting all these fucking emails from reporters asking if Cormac was dead,” Bogaards told Lloyd Grove at The Daily Beast.

Both Bogaards and McCarthy’s agent, Amanda Urban, are pretty P. O.-ed. “This isn’t even a story,” Urban said. “There must be something more interesting.” (Pan to, oh, I don’t know, this or this or this.)

And, anyway, if Cormac McCarthy had died it wouldn’t have been from a goddamn stroke. Look at this guy.