Maile Meloy's Top Ten List

Author Photo And Bio

Maile Meloy (born 1972) is an American fiction writer. Her celebrated debut, the story collection Half in Love (2002, PEN/Malamud Award), features many stories set in the American west about rugged, yet vulnerable characters who find some clarity in moments of crisis. Her first novel, Liars and Saints (2003, Orange Prize shortlist), explores sex (including statutory rape and incest) and longing, love and loss and deceit through the four generations of the Santerres, a French-Canadian Catholic family living in California. She continued the family’s story in her next novel, A Family Daughter (2006). The title of her next story collection, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (2009, New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year List), captures the moral quandary in which she places her characters. She has also published two YA novels, The Apothecary (2012, E.B. White Award) and its sequel, The Apprentices (2013). Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta and other publications, and she has received The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction.

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877). Anna’s adulterous love affair with Count Vronsky —which follows an inevitable, devastating road from their dizzyingly erotic first encounter at a ball to Anna’s exile from society and her famous, fearful end —is a masterwork of tragic love. What makes the novel so deeply satisfying, though, is how Tolstoy balances the story of Anna’s passion with a second semiautobiographical story of Levin’s spirituality and domesticity. Levin commits his life to simple human values: his marriage to Kitty, his faith in God, and his farming. Tolstoy enchants us with Anna’s sin, then proceeds to educate us with Levin’s virtue.

2. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967). Widely considered the most popular work in Spanish since Don Quixote, this novel —part fantasy, part social history of Colombia — sparked fiction’s “Latin boom” and the popularization of magic realism. Over a century that seems to move backward and forward simultaneously, the forgotten and offhandedly magical village of Macondo — home to a Faulknerian plethora of incest, floods, massacres, civil wars, dreamers, prudes, and prostitutes — loses its Edenic innocence as it is increasingly exposed to civilization.

3. American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997). Seymour “Swede” Levov embodies the American success story: a Jewish boy who became a football hero, a conscientious businessman, a good citizen. Then his alienated daughter commits an atrocious political crime and his idyllic world is blown apart by the same radical energies assaulting American innocence during the 1960s. Conflicting perspectives on its protagonist’s vulnerable combination of decency, righteousness, and naiveté make this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel both sweetly nostalgic and extremely angry.

4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955). “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” So begins the Russian master’s infamous novel about Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged man who falls madly, obsessively in love with a twelve-year-old “nymphet,” Dolores Haze. So he marries the girl’s mother. When she dies he becomes Lolita’s father. As Humbert describes their car trip —a twisted mockery of the American road novel —Nabokov depicts love, power, and obsession in audacious, shockingly funny language.

5. Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger (1953). Salinger gave his story collection the title Nine Stories, and that simple, enumerative title is just right, for the stories can be counted off like beads on a string: “For Esme with Love and Squalor,” “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut,” whose last line, “I was a good girl, wasnI?” never fails to break the reader’s heart. The pitch-perfect voices Salinger provides his characters make their dead-serious search for meaning taste like candy.

6. The Complete Aubrey/Maturin Novels by Patrick O'Brian (1914-2000). Set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, O'Brian's twenty-volume series centers on the enduring friendship between naval officer Jack Aubrey and physician (and spy) Stephen Maturin. Though they play with embellish historical events, the books proceed in chronological order – rich in period detail and language, as well as dry wit. The first novel, “The Master and the Commander” (1969), is set in 1800; the final novel, “Blue at Mizzen” (1999) is set after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The series also includes a posthumously published, uncompleted work, “The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey” (2004).

7. Stories of Flannery O’Connor (1925–64). Full of violence, mordant comedy, and a fierce Catholic vision that is bent on human salvation at any cost, Flannery O’Connor’s stories are like no others. Bigots, intellectual snobs, shyster preachers, and crazed religious seers —a full cavalcade of what critics came to call “grotesques”—careen through her tales, and O’Connor gleefully displays the moral inadequacy of all of them. Twentieth-century short stories often focus on tiny moments, but O’Connor’s stories, with their unswerving eye for vanity and their profound sense of the sacred, feel immense.

8. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945). Waugh was one of the twentieth century’s great satirists, yet this novel, widely considered his best, is not satiric. It is, instead, an examination of Roman Catholic faith as it is used, abused, embraced, and rejected by the Flytes, an aristocratic English family visited by alcoholism, adultery, and homoeroticism.

 

9. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (2004). At the dawn of the nineteenth century, two very different magicians emerge to change England's history. In the year 1806, with the Napoleonic Wars raging on land and sea, most people believe magic to be long dead in England—until the reclusive Mr Norrell reveals his powers, and becomes a celebrity overnight. Soon, another practicing magician comes forth: the young, handsome, and daring Jonathan Strange. He becomes Norrell's student, and they join forces in the war against France. But Strange is increasingly drawn to the wildest, most perilous forms of magic, straining his partnership with Norrell, and putting at risk everything else he holds dear.

10. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy (1985). D. H. Lawrence famously remarked that the archetypal American hero was a stoic, a loner, and a killer. Cormac McCarthy’s tale of the formation and dissolution of a band of scalp hunters in northern Mexico in the late 1840s embodies that dire maxim. Led by a soldier named Glanton and a mysterious, hairless, moral monstrosity known as the “Judge,” these freebooters wipe out Indians, Mexicans, and each other amidst a landscape of such sublime desolation one feels it leaching into their very souls.