The Applicant chronicles an artist, an immigrant, a student’s search for definition
On the question of why we create and engage with great literature
James McCurdy is a lifelong resident of the Rocky Mountains. Developing an interest in literature from an early age, McCurdy has continued to be engaged in the world of letters through his formal education, earning a dual BA in English Literature and Neuroscience. In his professional life, James has worked as a carpenter, a construction engineer and a grant writer. Through these diverse career choices, he has maintained a love of language and scholarship and is currently pursuing a Master's of English Literature at Freie Universität Berlin.
Fort Collins-based author-wizard Ramona Ausubel’s most recent novel, The Last Animal, released in 2023 and out now in paperback, makes leaps of imagination across continents and millennia seem perfectly plausible. The story involves single mother Jane, a frustrated grad student in paleobiology, recently widowed; and her two teenage daughters, Eve and Vera, The Last Animal opens with this codependent family unit on a scientific expedition to Siberia where the girls, on a typically boredom-filled afternoon, stumble upon the bones of a 4,000-year old woolly mammoth. That’s just the beginning. Mother and daughters, through a series of subterfuge-fueled moves, end up at an exotic animal farm in Italy where the DNA of their fossil is implanted into an elephant with the goal of resurrecting an extinct species. What happens beyond that is a series of tender, hilarious, heart-rending and suspenseful moments that testify to the unbreakable ties of family, for better or worse, alongside the loneliness and impossibility of thriving without connection. Smart, beguiling, touching and entertaining, The Last Animal peers into our shared animal souls, at once raising pertinent questions about the limits of bioengineering and taking the reader on a helluva good ride. — Kathryn Eastburn
