Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It »

With the succinct stories that have become her signature, Maile Meloy has graced literary publications from The New Yorker to The Paris Review and Best New American Voices. Her first published story collection, Half in Love, promises to bring Meloy's acclaimed vignettes to an even wider audience.

Award-winning writer Maile Meloy's return to short stories explores complex lives in an austere landscape with the clear-sightedness that first endeared her to readers.

Meloy's first return to short stories since her critically acclaimed debut, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It is an extraordinary new work from one of the most promising writers of the last decade.

Eleven unforgettable new stories demonstrate the emotional power and the clean, assured style that have earned Meloy praise from critics and devotion from readers. Propelled by a terrific instinct for storytelling, and concerned with the convolutions of modern love and the importance of place, 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.

Knowing, sly, and bittersweet, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It confirms Maile Meloy's singular literary talent. Her lean, controlled prose, full of insight and unexpected poignancy, is the perfect complement to her powerfully moving storytelling.

The Barnes & Noble Review

After two exceedingly good novels (Liars and Saints was shortlisted for the Orange Prize), Maile Meloy has returned with a full collection of the terse, emotionally compact short stories that she nails with precision and grace. This collection is loaded with daddy issues. Taken together, they create an interesting arc about the effect of a father's love or lack thereof on young girls: The daughter of a single father is unnerved when he can't protect her; a father confronts the girlfriend of his daughter's killer; two brothers, a ski bum and a bourgeois doctor, despise one another but compete over their fierce love for the doctor's teenage daughter, whom he regards as "the best thing [he] had ever done." Meanwhile, a wealthy Argentinian patriarch who discovers his former mistress is now working as maid, can look at his two indulged daughters and think that "children were experiments and his had failed." Many of these stories take place in Meloy's native Montana, with its big skies, vast spaces, and freakish summer snow. She is particularly deft when describing men of few words and compelling actions: In "Travis B.," a small-town ranch hand courts a big-city lawyer by showing up to take her to dinner on his horse. And in the exceptional "Lovely Rita," a young factory worker, confronted with death and a love he can't quite seem to grasp or even acknowledge, chooses to exile himself from his home as a way to distance himself from regret. Each one of these stories is a tiny, perfectly crafted masterpiece. --Amy Benfer