Edie Meidav is the author of The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon and Crawl Space.Winner of a Lannan Fellowship, a Howard Fellowship, the Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman, and the Bard Fiction Prize, she teaches at Bard College.
Her new novel is Lola, California.
Meidav's reply to my recent query about what she was reading:
Another way to phrase this question might be: why do I always come back to J.M. Coetzee? Because he is so spare and unremitting in his artistic vision. For anyone with maximalistVisit Edie Meidav's website and blog.tendencies, the guy serves as a welcome corrective. Right now I'm reading Summertime, which is such a thinly masked roman a clef that a new, metafictionally oriented genre should be created, called clef a roman. Reader's caveat or guide: for those new to Coetzee, begin with Disgrace; if you're hooked, read The Life and Times of Michael K.; possibly detour at Age of Iron; continue to the memoir Boyhood; and then on to Summertime. Do not start with Summertime.
I also just read Brad Morrow's The Diviners Tale, which I enjoyed for these reasons: not since Norman Rush's Mating have I read such a convincing male ventriloquism of a female voice.He also effectively turns the genre ghost tale on its head, and yet does so without sacrificing narrative tension: a real tour de force of a novel.
Finally, I am reading James Woods' book on fiction, which, may I say this hubristically, is as witty, pointed, and ultimately creative as one of Harold Bloom's nightmares. And I'm looking forward to reading Carolyn Cooke's Daughters of the Revolution which promises to unravel an entire era of discomfiture in both racial and gender relations.
--Marshal Zeringue
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