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On Oprah's Summer Reading List for 2010
Award-winning writer Maile Meloy's return to short stories explores complex lives in an austere landscape with the clear-sightedness that first endeared her to readers.
Eleven unforgettable new stories demonstrate the emotional power and the clean, assured style that have earned Meloy praise from critics and devotion from readers. Propelled by a terrific instinct for storytelling, and concerned with the convolutions of modern love and the importance of place, this collection is about the battlefields—and fields of victory—that exist in seemingly harmless spaces, in kitchens and living rooms and cars. Set mostly in the American West, the stories feature small-town lawyers, ranchers, doctors, parents, and children and explore the moral quandaries of love, family, and friendship. A ranch hand falls for a recent law-school graduate who appears unexpectedly—and reluctantly—in his remote Montana town...
After two exceedingly good novels (Liars and Saints was shortlisted for the Orange Prize), Maile Meloy has returned with a full collection of the terse, emotionally compact short stories that she nails with precision and grace. This collection is loaded with daddy issues. Taken together, they create an interesting arc about the effect of a father's love or lack thereof on young girls: The daughter of a single father is unnerved when he can't protect her; a father confronts the girlfriend of his daughter's killer; two brothers, a ski bum and a bourgeois doctor, despise one another but compete over their fierce love for the doctor's teenage daughter, whom he regards as "the best thing [he] had ever done." Meanwhile, a wealthy Argentinian patriarch who discovers his former mistress is now working as maid, can look at his two indulged daughters and think that "children were experiments and his had failed." Many of these stories take place in Meloy's native Montana, with its big skies, vast spaces, and freakish summer snow. She is particularly deft when describing men of few words and compelling actions: In "Travis B.," a small-town ranch hand courts a big-city lawyer by showing up to take her to dinner on his horse. And in the exceptional "Lovely Rita," a young factory worker, confronted with death and a love he can't quite seem to grasp or even acknowledge, chooses to exile himself from his home as a way to distance himself from regret. Each one of these stories is a tiny, perfectly crafted masterpiece. --Amy Benfer
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Pieter Dandois
reviewed Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It on July 24, 2010
Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It
This wonderful title is a quote from a poem by A.R.Ammons, and is an apt description of the quandary encapsulated in each of these stories. Often enough the wanting it both ways is the classic case of the husband hoping to keep both wife and lover, or hoping for the chance to juggle the two - funny how it's rarely a woman trying to keep all the plates spinning. But this is not the only kind of wishful thinking, there is also the child who regrets the departure of her mother's glamorous lover and his appealing son, or the very funny rivalry between two brothers who would dearly love to do without the other as ego booster and audience to and judge of their success. My favourite was the first in the collection, a broken, isolated young man of mixed Cheyenne Indian background, fizzing with loneliness, drives to the nearest town and just follows people into a building, as if he were a stray dog. He finds himself in an adult education class taught by a young and attractive lawyer. Mesmerised by her, he returns each week, and attempts a restrained courtship of this unapproachable creature who lives six hundred miles away, a telling indication of how much separates them, even though her mother works in a school cafeteria and her sister works in a hospital laundry and "selling shoes is the nicest job a girl from my family is supposed to get." And that restraint is a key to Meloy's narrative style; there are no verbal fireworks, but a calm and unexcited expression of emotion, a style that is more rather than less effective at conveying that surge of empathy.
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