New York: Dutton, (1984) dj. Hardcover first edition - A book which re-creates "Anton Chekhov's self-exploratory journey in 1890 across Russia to a penal colony on the island of Sakhalin and interweaves it with the author's own journey, in an exploration of the need for freedom and meaning." Author Noel Perrin commented: "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…
New York: Dutton, (1984) dj. Hardcover first edition - A book which re-creates "Anton Chekhov's self-exploratory journey in 1890 across Russia to a penal colony on the island of Sakhalin and interweaves it with the author's own journey, in an exploration of the need for freedom and meaning." Author Noel Perrin commented: "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." Double page map. Notes. 196 pp. ISBN: 0-52524235X.
TO A DISTANT ISLAND.
