Fresh, imaginative, witty -- these have all been used to describe Judith McCormack's stories, gathered here in a powerful debut collection. Her offbeat characters, many of them lawyers, provide a lively look at the absurdities which lie beneath the skin of everyday life. A grocer who sells lobsters, a Cuban apothecary, a hapless thief, and a dreamy lawyer who navigates by smell are some of the people who fall in and out of trouble in these stories. The collection follows their restless attempts to find footing in a colourful but tricky landscape. All of this is detailed in language with a remarkable sense of cadence, punctuated with tart insights.
Praise for Judith McCormack and Backspring Nominated for the 2016 Amazon.ca First Novel Award “A well-written and smart novel that unfolds many moments of profound and subtle beauty. McCormack’s treatment of details and prose are refreshing, confident, and attentive.”—The Winnipeg Review "A joy to read."—Nino Ricci "A wonderfully and uniquely gifted storyteller."—Midwest Book Review Eduardo, an architect from Lisbon, has come to Montreal to be with his wife Geneviève. Geneviève researches fungi and likes to catalog her orgasms. But when Eduardo is caught in an explosion and rumors of arson begin to circulate, both his marriage and his fledgling architecture firm verge on collapse. Gorgeous, colorful, and richly described, Backspring is a sensual taxonomy of desire. Judith McCormack, born near Chicago, has been nominated for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award.
A NYT Book Review Best Historical Fiction Book of the Year "The Singing Forest blends thought-provoking reflections on the moral reckoning of war crimes with ... a young woman’s attempts to decode her eccentric professional and personal families."—Alida Becker, New York Times In attempting to bring a suspected war criminal to justice, a lawyer wrestles with power, accountability, and her Jewish identity. In a quiet forest in Belarus, two boys stumble across a long-kept secret: the mass grave where Stalin’s police secretly murdered thousands in the 1930s. The results of the subsequent investigation have far-reaching effects, and across the Atlantic in Toronto, Leah Jarvis, a lively, curious young lawyer, finds herself tasked with an impossible case: the deportation of elderly Stefan Drozd, who fled his crimes in Kurapaty for a new identity in Canada. Leah is convinced of Drozd’s guilt, but she needs hard facts. She travels to Belarus in search of witnesses only to find herself asking increasingly complex questions. What is the relationship between chance, inheritance, and justice? Between her own history—her mother’s death, her father’s absence, the shadows of her Jewish heritage—and the challenges that now confront her? Beautiful and wrenching by turns, The Singing Forest is a profound investigation of truth and memory—and the moving story of one man’s past and one woman’s determination to reckon with it.
This catalogue accompanies the exhibition "Judith Godwin: Paintings, 1954-2002." It includes color illustrations of the eighteen works included in the show, an introduction by Ira Spanierman, and essays by Lowery Stokes Sims and David Ebony.
In the spring of 1967, James Merrill taught a creative writing course in poetry at the Univ. of Wisconsin. Judith Moffett was a graduate student in the course. The two connected in Madison, and in the years that followed, during which Moffett completed her degree and embarked on a teaching career, Merrill served in the role of mentor, encouraging her writing and critiquing seriously the poems she sent him. Their friendship--conducted mainly through letters, as they were seldom in the same location--developed and deepened. From the start Moffett had found her mentor's poetry uniquely mesmerizing. She reviewed his books as they appeared, and a literary-critical study of his work--James Merrill: An Introduction to the Poetry--was published in 1984 by Columbia University Press. And through it all they wrote to each other. Merrill, one of the last great correspondents to write on paper, sent Moffett hundreds of letters, including many that covered his years at work on his Ouija board trilogy, The Changing Light at Sandover. Unlikely Friends quotes extensively from these letters--letters which comprise a treasure trove of insight into Merrill's thinking and poetic practice. Scholars and critics will find them fascinating.Other readers may be engaged with the mysterious psychological side of their story. For the course of the relationship was complicated, sometimes tortuous, owing to the fact that almost at once Moffett's feelings about the gay poet approached obsession. Both found her feelings difficult to deal with, and it would be long years before the driving force behind the strange attraction became clear and allowed the obsessive quality to fade out of the friendship. But despite the awkwardness and tension which that obsession created between them for so long, Merrill remained faithful in his support of Moffett's work and career in poetry. Moreover, he continued to keep faith after she had left poetry for science fiction. Through all its ups and downs, their unlikely friendship endured until Merrill's death in 1995.
The focus of this small book is on how Blessed Mary Mackillop can speak to our lives today. As we face various challenges - new beginnings, endings, creative moments - we can learn from Mary's responses to such situations. This woman who managed trouble and suffering, who grew as a person by knowing and accepting her own personal strengths and weaknesses, and who trusted God through it all, is a guiding light in the twenty-first century, just as she was in the nineteenth. The book is enhanced by evocative illustrations prepared by Dorothy Woodward RSJ.
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