Half in Love: Stories - Hardcover

Meloy, Maile

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743216474 ISBN 13: 9780743216470

Publisher: Scribner, 2002

Synopsis

Maile Meloy's smart, surprising and emotional stories, published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and Best New American Voices, have already earned her devoted admirers. Lean and controlled in their narration, abundant and moving in their effects, the fourteen stories collected in Half in Love are the debut of a striking new talent. Ten of the stories take place in the modern American West, and in Meloy's unsentimental vision this world becomes vivid and unexpected. In her story "Tome," the disabled client of a Montana lawyer takes a Samoan football player hostage. In "Four Lean Hounds, ca. 1976," two young couples, bound by a complicated friendship, face a complicated grief when one of the four dies. The college-bound daughter of a ranch foreman, in "Ranch Girl," has to choose which adult world she wants to occupy. And in "A Stakes Horse," a young woman deals with risk and loss, both at the racetrack and at home. In small towns and in isolated country, these characters face violence and dread and betrayal, love and loss of love and the ease with which life can be disrupted -- all rendered in Meloy's clear, assured style. Other stories in the collection take us to different times and places with the same remarkable skill and intuition. In "Red," a young American soldier in World War II encounters an English girl exhausted by the Blitz. Guests in a Greek villa, looking for gossip in "Last of the White Slaves," find a more disconcerting story than they wanted. And in "Aqua Boulevard" -- winner of the 2001 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction -- an elderly Parisian confronts his fear of death. Meloy's command of her characters' voices is breathtaking; their fears and desires are deftly illuminated. Meloy's characters inevitably stand on the edge of something -- of discovery or decision or change -- and Meloy delivers these moments with a stirring combination of authority and sympathy. This is a voice of astonishing clarity and unforgettable emotional power.

About this title

About the Author:

Maile Meloy was born in Helena, Montana. She received the 2001 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction for the best story published in The Paris Review. Her stories have also appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Ontario Review and Best New American Voices. She lives in California.

From Publishers Weekly:

The 14 stories in Meloy's confident, polished debut tell the tales of many different people lawyers, ranchers, ex-pats and school girls often as, in moments of clarity, their understanding of their place in the world poignantly shifts. In the spare, haunting "Four Lean Hounds, ca. 1976," a young man mourns the drowning of his best friend and his wife's infidelity, even as he realizes that "all he could hate his friend for was that [he] had been loved." In "Thirteen and a Half," a homely girl briefly singled out by an unfamiliar and dangerous boy at a school dance registers his choice as something akin to a life-altering serendipity, as she watches him vanish "among the boys who were just boys, who meant nothing to her, boys she saw every day of her life." Death both animal and human, either experienced or imminent plays a part in many of Meloy's stories. A champion colt's terrible frostbite complicates an already knotty marriage in the heartbreaking "Kite Whistler Aquamarine," while a father's terminal cancer gives his daughter a different understanding of what's fair and what should be risked in "A Stakes Horse." "Ranch Girl," one of the 10 stories Meloy sets in her native West, is one of her strongest and sharpest: "If you're white, and you're not rich or poor but somewhere in the middle, it's hard to have worse luck than to be born a girl on a ranch," the narrator says, even as she refuses to leave. Though Meloy leans toward minimalism and a few of the stories seem pinched as a result she is a fluid, confident and talented writer capable of moments of true grace.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0743216474
• ISBN 13: 9780743216470
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176