The latest contributor to
Writers Read: Maile Meloy, author of the story collection
Half in Love and the novel
Liars and Saints, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Last year, Meloy applied the "
Page 99 Test" to her third book,
A Family Daughter.
Her entry opens:
I’ve been reading the Aubrey and Maturin novels by Patrick O’Brian, the series that begins with Master and Commander. For those who don’t already know and love them, the books 
are set during the Napoleonic wars at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and follow the adventures of Jack Aubrey, a captain in the Royal Navy, and Stephen Maturin, an Irish-Catalonian ship’s surgeon and naturalist. Aubrey is brave, skillful, and lucky at sea, and easy prey for swindlers on land. Maturin is a brilliant linguist and spy, and an occasional addict, who can’t tell starboard from larboard and tends to fall into the water. Aubrey is wholehearted and bearish, Maturin sharp-tongued and secretive and reflective. But that’s simplifying the appeal of their twenty-book friendship. I have no particular interest in the sailing or fighting of square-rigged ships, but I’ve never been so attached to any fictional characters in my life. [read on]
Visit
Maile Meloy's website.
The Page 99 Test: A Family Daughter.
Writers Read: Maile Meloy.
--Marshal Zeringue
The latest contributor to Writers Read: Maile Meloy, author of the story collection Half in Love and the novel Liars and Saints, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
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