Edie Meidav

the last of the dream is in the field

Biography

Edie Meidav was born in Toronto and has lived in New York, Sri Lanka and various European zones. She now is in residence at Bard College. As a child, she sent away more than once for sea monkeys.

Poetry, fiction and nonfiction have been published in Ms., The Village Voice, The Kenyon Review, Terra Nova, The American Voice, New Letters, Conjunctions and elsewhere.

Novels by Edie Meidav

Short stories
New stories in Conjunctions, Fifth Wednesday, and Chattahoochee Review
A story narrated by an Iraqi vet; an excerpt from forthcoming novel; a fabulistic story in "Betwixt and Between", current issue of Conjunctions; a story written in 20 minutes "Kingdom of the Young"; a story set in upstate New York
Next novel: published by Farrar Straus
STEAL ME
A contemporary novel set in California concerning death penalty, motherhood, dystopia
Fiction
CRAWL SPACE
An exploration of the mind of evil. "He is quite a creation indeed, this aging anti-Quixote with his residual windmills to tilt at." -- Thomas Kenneally, The Washington Post
THE FAR FIELD: A NOVEL OF CEYLON Winner of the Kafka Award; A Best Book of the Year (L.A. Times et al)
An epic, intimate novel in which a blundering westerner goes east. "Complex, imaginative."
--Chitra Divakaruni
From IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER by Calvino:
"Anyway, the conclusion to which all stories come is that the life a person has led is one and one alone, uniform and compact as a shrunken blanket where you can't distinguish the fibers of the weave. And so if by chance I happen to dwell on some ordinary detail of an ordinary day, the visit of a Sinhalese who wants to sell me a litter of newborn crocodiles in a zinc tub, I can be sure that even in this tiny, insignificant episode there is implicit everything I have experienced, all the past, the multiple pasts I have tried in vain to leave behind me, the lives that in the end are soldered into an overall life, my life, which continues even in this place from which I have decided I must not move any more, this little house with a courtyard garden in the Parisian banlieu where I have set up my tropical-fish aquarium, a quiet business, which forces me more than any other would to lead a stable life, because you can't neglect the fish, not even for one day."

"I saw that long-forgotten Russian boy as clearly as anything, leaping about the meadows with his butterfly net; I saw him as a messenger of joy, returning from that distant summer day to open his specimen box and release the most beautiful red admirals, peacock butterflies, brimstones and tortoiseshells to signal my final liberation."

-- W.G. Sebald, THE EMIGRANTS