Half in Love
Stories
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Fourteen remarkable stories that combine strong Western settings with a subtle and distinct female voice. This critically celebrated debut collection marks the exciting beginning of prize-winner Meloy’s promising career.
Lean and controlled in their narration, abundant and moving in their effects, Maile Meloy’s stories introduce a striking talent. Most are set in the modern American West, made vivid and unexpected in Meloy’s unsentimental vision; others take us to Paris, wartime London, and Greece, with the same remarkable skill and intuition.
In “Four Lean Hounds, ca. 1976,” two couples face a complicated grief when one of the four dies. In “Ranch Girl,” the college-bound daughter of a ranch foreman must choose which adult world she wants to occupy. In “A Stakes Horse,” a woman confronts risk and loss at the racetrack and at home. And in “Aqua Boulevard”—winner of the 2001 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction—an elderly Parisian confronts his mortality. Meloy’s command of her characters’ voices is breathtaking; their fears and desires are deftly illuminated. Smart, surprising, and evocative, Meloy’s brilliantly observed stories fully engage the mind and heart.
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 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.
