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Maile Meloy: Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

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Date and time
Monday, June 28, 2010

Short story writer and novelist Maile Meloy reads and discusses her newly in paperback collection of stories, *Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It*. 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.

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Maile Meloy is the author of the story collection *Half in Love*, the novels *Liars and Saints* and *A Family Daughter*, and the new collection, *Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It*, which was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2009 by the New York Times Book Review. Meloy’s stories have been published in *The New Yorker*, *The Paris Review*, *Zoetrope: All-Story*, *Granta*, and other publications, and she has received The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles.