James McConkey

In 1890, Anton Chekhov, already a prominent Russian literary figure, travelled 6,500 miles to Sakhalin island, off the coast of Siberia. Willing visitors to this island were rare; rather, its inhabitants were people who had been sent there: prisoners and their families, guards, soldiers, and doctors. What was it that Chekhov sought on this terrible island? Almost a century later, James McConkey traveled to Italy and researched Chekhov's letters, memoirs, and an account of his journey to Sakhalin island. McConkey recreates that journey, weaving it with his own and telling two stories that reveal the peculiar and hidden forces that shape our lives.

To a Distant Island

Oxford University Press

An intriguing collection of writings--by St. Augustine, Lewis Thomas, James Baldwin, Annie Dillard, Maya Angelou, Eudora Welty, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, and many others--explores the elusive nature of memory and its complex and diverse roles in human life. UP.

An Anthology

The Anatomy of Memory

These sequential meditations by one of our most skillful writers constitute a unique genre -- part autobiography, part introspection, part observation, part narrative -- in which a life is continually re-examined in the light of experience and time. Taking personal experience as his core, McConkey builds upon it to reveal connections and create an encompassing "court of memory." We come to know him, his family, his friends, and in the process we recognize elements of our own lives as well. The nexus through which these words pass is the writer's memory. His opening quotation from St. Augustine tells much about both the man and his vision: "All this I do inside me, in the huge court of my memory. There I have by me the sky, the earth, the sea, and all the things in them which I have been able to perceive... There too I encounter myself." Book jacket.

James McConkey

Books

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