Jane McCafferty

A riveting exploration of sisterhood follows Gladys and Ivy, two sisters who have long depended on each other, as they cope with the aftermath of the death of Gladys's two children and the breakup of her marriage. A first novel. Reprint.

A Novel

One Heart

Jim Daniels

Poetry. Photography. "In FROM MILLTOWN TO MALLTOWN, poets Jim Daniels and Jane McCafferty team up with photographer Charlee Brodsky to create work of exponential force in much the same way their subjects: the steel mill era ghosts of Homestead, Pennsylvania, confront the gleaming demons of its mall-ified present. The result is a provocative and haunting portrait of working class America in decline and the scars we bear in the name of progress. Disturbing, elegiac, and at times, wickedly wry, the chemistry between Brodsky's bleak, beautifully spare photos and the poets' renegade imaginations jolts us in the way art must"--Dorianne Laux.

Poems

From Milltown to Malltown

The characters in Jane McCafferty’s Director of the World and Other Stories are often distanced, lonely, or displaced from others and the events around them, yet they are almost always ready to act, to become involved with others, and to change. In “Eyes of Others,” a woman, stopping with her family at a Howard Johnson’s during a trip, becomes fascinated by the meeting of two strangers and attempts to connect with them as she has been unable to connect with her own family. Implicit in these stories is a rootlessness that gives way to yearning and a passion for remembering. In the title story, a disturbed child, whose father has recently abandoned the family, attempts, in language reflecting her shattered sense of the world, to recapture some of their last experiences together. These characters, and others in the collection, attempt to make sense of their broken lives and shattered thoughts. As John Wideman writes of the stories, there is “a sense of commitment to the struggle of making silent worlds speak, of forcing what is threatening or evil or destructive into some form we can see and conjure with.”

Jane McCafferty

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