Edie Meidav

New stories in Conjunctions, Fifth Wednesday, and Chattahoochee Review
Chattahoochee Review: story set in upstate New York and an interview conducted by Scott Esposito

Conjunctions: excerpt from forthcoming novel "Utopia, or, My Pleasure"; Iraqi vet story, "Beef"; story based on a value praised and often overheard in Italy; and fabulism on aging "The Golden Rule, Or, I Am Only Trying to Do the Right Thing"

Fifth Wednesday Journal: story written in 20 minutes "Kingdom of the Young", nominated for a Pushcart

STEAL ME
Excerpts have appeared in Guernica (online) and in Conjunctions -- excerpt below will be updated occasionally:

-----
All you must do is connect with prison mind. Vic’s beloved guard Javier loves telling him this. “Prison mind means you got to choose the terms of your imprisonment. Also you got to try to understand connection.”

Javier happens to be a third-rate philosopher who could have awoken to find himself in a two-bit coffeehouse rather than a grade-one prison: he does not belong in a world made up of contraband tattoo guns, shanks sharpened from seat-release levers stolen from admin chairs, drug-sniffing German shepherds and a super who makes up for his short height by walking the hallways daily around four o’clock with razor nose aloft, squinting into the bike-repair shop where Vic worked in the beginning before he’d tried the child’s toy factory until he finally gave up on finding any meaning through the prison’s idea of work.

Vic actually likes the pompous superintendent and his predictability, his childish bliss when ordering the masked, hooded, armor-plated cell-extraction team to come, the super’s obvious enjoyment in rippling safety measures through the institution at the slightest encounter of defiance in an offender. On his walkie talkie, the super becomes ecstatically terse: we found a kite, he mutters, a kite and a tool besides.
----------------------
Rose: crossing a square in Spain, could be Valencia or Granada or any of the places where two girls stay the summer after high school, sleeping under rowboats or in flowerbeds, in hostels or pensions with balustrades and mites made venerable and happy by tourists, but it happens to be a less trafficked area of Barcelona, not far from where Senegalese vendors pray, and Rose is all chrysalis, bruisable and diffident, aware of contours, thrilled by what remains, the people she will meet, the ones who will show her all her possible faces, hidden now in magic invisible cloak-wings.

She is crossing a newly washed square toward Lana in a white t-shirt called a wife-beater, and does it matter whether she holds aloft two drinks and one straw, or one drink with two straws, and whether the drink is horchata or limonata, and that in a shaded patio Lana sits awaiting Rose with some dark-browed man they have just met?

The man doesn’t matter: he just spells the possibility of resuscitation, the name of some new adventure. Rose’s tongue inches forward, all is still potential. The surface of her skin could be a plum’s, ripe and ready for anything, because she has sap: Rose is still included in Lana.

All that matters is crossing toward her friend, their bubble only recently burst, Rose mostly no longer an observer, now someone deserving to take breath and live. She walks toward her friend and every step commutes what had been one long, lonely life sentence.

What goads her on could be as happenstance as the single brush of an arm as they stride along a railway platform, enough to act as a million fireflies of encouragement in the dark of all they leave unsaid. Rose shivers. They will never be lovers, they have been newly set loose on the world, fairly oblivious to everyone else. Masters or meteors: two girls at seventeen.

CRAWL SPACE
Winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, The Electric Review Citation, a LitBlog Consortium Nominee, a Best Book of 2005 by various publications, and a Lannan Fellowship
(See HOME for more info.)

In 1999, a war criminal returns to the site of his 1940s crimes in rural France, finding succor among a group of teenage anarchists, little knowing that his worst betrayal is yet to come.

THE FAR FIELD: A NOVEL OF CEYLON Winner of the Kafka Award; A Best Book of the Year (L.A. Times et al)
"Edie Meidav is a student of human bewilderment. In her first novel — about an American called Henry Gould trying to establish a utopian community in the British colony of Ceylon — she's woven the blundering figure of a holy fool into a bristling tapestry of local life. The Far Field is historical fiction without a shred of nostalgia, and its plot is justified by Meidav's scarifying emotional honesty and visceral sense of place."
-- Jacob Benfer, The Village Voice

"Before civil war-torn Sri Lanka became Sri Lanka, it was the British colony of Ceylon, and on this island off the coast of India, Meidav focuses the ferocious, prodigious energies of her sprawling debut novel, a work that has been justly compared to the fiction of Ondaatje and Kingsolver . . .In rugged, cadenced prose, Meidav delineates both the inevitability of human solitariness and the longing for the exoticism of the other. As in Peter Matthiessen's AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD, the novel skewers the cool superiority of the hubristic colonizing mentality . . .Meidav succeeds on two levels, illuminating a rarely glimpsed culture and examining the tragic fallout of culture clash."
-- starred review in Publisher's Weekly

"It’s rare to find an embodiment of the proverbial quest for authenticity as perfectly realized as it is in Henry Fyre Gould. He’s the naïve, sympathetic former fraud inspector and spiritual leader who, armed with nothing more than a great wad of cash and some grandiose expectations, sets sail for Ceylon at the start of Edie Meidav’s rich, roiling first novel, THE FAR FIELD...In creating a fictional world as complex and all-consuming as Ceylon itself, Meidav has isolated and illuminated a place at which we all find ourselves occasionally: the muddled intersection of beauty and elusive truth. That she navigates it so well is perhaps her greatest achievement."
-- Melanie Rehak, Newsday