Maile Meloy: best books

Maile Meloy is the author of the recently published story collection, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.

For The Week magazine, she named "six books that have changed her idea of 'what’s possible in fiction'." One title on her list:

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (Vintage, $15).

This has been one of my favorite books for years, and I just “reread” it by listening to it on my iPod. A friend of mine was horrified, but I don’t see why: The audiobook forces you to slow down to the pace of men walking through Mexico or riding on horseback—no skimming—and drops you into the huge, mannered nightmare journey of the book.

Read about another book on the list.

Blood Meridian is one authority's pick for the Great Texas novel and is among Clive Sinclair's top 10 westerns, the New York Times list of the best American fiction of the last 25 years, and the top ten works of literature according to Stephen King.

Maile Meloy is the author of the story collection Half in Love, and the novels Liars and Saints, shortlisted for the 2005 Orange Prize, and A Family Daughter. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, and she has received The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2007 Meloy was chosen as one of Granta’s Best American Novelists under 35.

Visit Maile Meloy's website.

What is Maile Meloy reading?

The Page 69 Test: Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.

The Page 99 Test: Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.

--Marshal Zeringue