Stories from My Life with the Other Animals

Like all of James McConkey's writing, this book defies conventional definition. It deals with memory - McConkey's memory - of events and lives, politics and family, people and animals, all reconstructed as interwoven stories that are convincing, poignant, and uniquely insightful. His is a visionary journey, neither totally factual nor completely fictive. Instead, McConkey takes a transparency of the past, lays it upon the present, and creates a newly focused image. In Stories from My Life with the Other Animals, he revisits his intimate history to create a totally credible journey of the soul, a journey that sweeps the reader along by the sincerity and precision of the speaker's language, clarity, and probity.

Stories from My Life with the Other Animals forms the final volume in the author's great Court of Memory trilogy a monumental attempt to articulate a message and meaning from his life. Proust wrote, "Those who are haunted by the confused remembrance of truths they have never known are the men who are gifted; but if they never go beyond saying that they can hear a ravishing tune, they convey nothing to others. They are without talent." McConkey, bravely, brilliantly, successfully, grapples with this memory, bringing the truths of his life to light. His is an immense talent.