Sign-In
Cart
To a Distant Island
Paperback
Historical FiguresLiterary Figures
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
ISBN13: 9780966491357
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Published: Nov 1 2000
Pages: 203
Weight: 0.71
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.20 Depth: 8.87
Language: English
One of our finest writers.--Annie Dillard
What a pleasure, and how much there is to learn from this short book! --Denise Levertov
A deeply moving, exquisitely written book.--Washington Post Book World
Exceptionally serene prose...leveled with sharp observation and subtle wit...neither history nor fiction, but rather a kind of reimagining of the past.--Michael Dirda, Smithsonian Magazine
We have had many straight biographies of writers in recent years...that leave their subjects curiously diminished. Mr. McConkey's achievement...is to send the reader back to the Russian master with renewed wonder.--Harvey Shapiro, The New York Times
In 1890 Anton Chekhov--thirty years old and already a famous writer--left his home and family in Moscow to travel 6,500 miles across Russia, over frozen land and sea, by train, ferry, and troika, to visit the island of Sakhalin, a penal colony off the coast of Siberia.
What was Chekhov seeking by undertaking such a harrowing journey to that God-forsaken island? Ostensibly, he went in his role of physician, to observe the medical conditions and to collect statistical information (Indeed, Chekhov wrote that during his stay he filled out more than 10,000 census cards based on interviews with prisoners and exiles.) But his motivation, as James McConkey reflects, was more likely escape: escape from the sense of confinement that fame, fortune, and family had brought--a search, in other words, for freedom in a place where no one was free.
In To a Distant Island, McConkey recreates Chekhov's remarkable journey in all of its complexity, while interweaving a journey of his own. As McConkey guides us through the Russian wilderness and into the soul of this great writer, he uncovers the peculiar and hidden forces that shaped two lives.
The genre in which McConkey does his best writing has no name. He invented it...What McConkey does is to create meaning out of ordinary life. He'll take a tiny incident...and by linking it through memory with a series of past events, he'll create what is not exactly a story but a pattern in time. By then the incident is no longer small; it has become the focus for a revelation...His books should be famous. --Noel Perrin, U.S.A. Today
James McConkey is the author of Crossroads, The Tree House Confessions, The Novels of E.M. Forster, and Court of Memory (a continuing biography that appeared serially in various magazines, primarily The New Yorker), and many other books. He is Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus at Cornell University.
Jay Parini is Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College. He is the author of The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Last Year and Robert Frost: A Life and many other works of fiction, criticism, poetry, and biography.
Also in
Literary Figures
Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times
Sachs, Aaron
Hardcover
Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park
Vetch, Aaron
Cirino, Mark
Elder
Hardcover
Go Deep and Take Plenty of Root: A Prairie-Norwegian Father, Rebellion in Minneapolis, Basement Zen, Growing Up, Growing Tender
Storlie, Erik Fraser
Paperback
Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival
Greenblatt, Stephen
Hardcover
Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend
Romney, Rebecca
Paperback
Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear: A. A. Milne and the Creation of Winnie-The-Pooh
Brandreth, Gyles
Hardcover
Travels with Charley in Search of America: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Steinbeck, John
Paperback
Plot Twist: Life, Craft, and the Messy First Draft: A Memoir on Writing (Large Print Edition)
Coben, Harlan
Paperback
The Village on the Edge of the World: Writing and Surviving in Ceausescu's Romania
Müller, Herta
Hardcover
The War for Middle-Earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945
Loconte, Joseph
Hardcover
Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe
Ogden, Emily
Hardcover
Miss Greene's Secret: Based on the True Story of the Black Librarian Who Shaped the Morgan Library
Antona, Nicolas
Hardcover
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Winchester, Simon
Paperback
String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis: A Library of America Special Publication
Wallace, David Foster
Hardcover
Mon Cher Amour: The Love Letters of Albert Camus and Maria Casares, 1944-1959
Camus, Albert
Hardcover
The Agatha Christie Cure: What Reading the Queen of Crime Taught Me about Life
Rentzenbrink, Cathy
Hardcover
Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece the Sun Also Rises
Blume, Lesley M. M.
Paperback
Henry and June: From a Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diary (1931-1932) of Anais Nin
Nin, Anaïs
Paperback
The World of Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None a 1000-Piece Jigsaw Puzzle: Illustrated by Ruby Ash
Agatha Christie Ltd, Agatha Christie
Other