[Name of the Writer]

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Maile Meloy

Introduction

Maile Meloy; an American fiction author was born and raised on January 1, 1972 in Helena, Montana. In 1994, she graduated from the University of California, Irvine with an M.F.A in fiction and also holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard College. (Wikepedia, 2011)

Amongst her many accomplishments, she won The Paris Review's Aga Khan Prize for Fiction in 2001 for her story “Aqua Boulevard.” Two years later, in 2003, she won the “PEN/Malamud Award” for her first collection of short stories, “Half in Love” followed by the “Guggenheim Fellowship” in 2004. She was also included on the list of the 21 "Best Young American Novelists in 2007. Maile Meloy is also a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and has also written for the New York Times from time to time. (Maile Meloy, 2011)

This essay embarks upon the life and work of one of America's finest contemporary writers; Maile Meloy. The paper begins with focusing on the life and background of Maile Meloy and then transitions into evaluating her writing style; focusing mainly on the themes, settings and genre. Additionally the paper also attempts to gauge the reviews of the critics about Maile Meloy moving on towards the interpretations of one of her books; Ranch Girl. Finally the paper is concluded on my own experience involved in summing up the entire paper.

Discussion

Writing Style

Maile Meloy's style of writing can be expressed as plain, simple and descriptively precise where words are deftly pushed around to work their magic. (Maile Meloy, 2011) Her technique retreats before the things that are imagined. Landscapes appear; scenes unfold; people want things and don't want things; and sometimes the wanting and not wanting happen in the same person, at the same time—titles are useful clues after all. (NY Times, 2006)

To a certain extent, Maile Meloy's work also seemed to be reflective and wistful without becoming sentimental or maudlin and has experimented with various forms, at the same time utilizing a number of various difficult structures such as sestina and villanelle. Moreover, her tone of writing is usually in a third person whereas her combination of undemanding fiction with no syntactically challenging sentences shelved with vivid and lively narrative that tends to advances briskly, unfolding intriguing sequence of events chapter by chapter. (NY Times, 2006) Moreover the manner in which conflicts is introduced with such poise, subtleness and clarity signaling the importance of both physicality and violence in a story. While all these elements of Maile Meloy's writing are good, one evidently starts to scratch their head over the vanishingly few metaphors she employs in from time to time. Moreover, when these metaphors do tend to appear, they make an appearance, they're quite basic, even pedestrian. Although Maile Meloy's writing can be explained as simple and undemanding, she tends to use it very well thus, in turn staying faithful to things and people along with the ambivalence and complexities required by the nature of the book.

Critics

According to the New York Times, Maile Meloy's book, “Both Ways ...