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One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2009, 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.
Meloy's first return to short stories since her critically acclaimed debut, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It is an extraordinary new work from one of the most promising writers of the last decade.
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. A young father opens his door to find his dead grandmother standing on the front step. Two women weigh love and betrayal during an early snow. Throughout the book, Meloy examines the tensions between having and wanting, as her characters try to keep hold of opposing forces in their lives: innocence and experience, risk and stability, fidelity and desire.
Knowing, sly, and bittersweet, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It confirms Maile Meloy's singular literary talent. Her lean, controlled prose, full of insight and unexpected poignancy, is the perfect complement to her powerfully moving storytelling.
One of the New York Times Book Review's Top 10 Books of 2009
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Juan Gonzales
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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Add Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2009, 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. Meloy's first return, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It to the inventory that you are selling on WonderClubX
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Add Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2009, 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. Meloy's first return, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It to your collection on WonderClub |
