Introduction
Edie Meidav (born Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is an American novelist.
Life
She graduated with a B.A., Yale University, and M.F.A., Mills College.
Her fiction, poetry, and criticism have appeared in Writing on Air (MIT Press), On Globalization (MIT Press), Now Write! Fiction Writing Exercises from Today's Best Teachers and Writers (Penguin, 2006), and other anthologies, and in Village Voice, Conjunctions, The American Voice, Ms., The Kenyon Review, The Chattahoochee Review.
She is the former director of the Writing and Consciousness Program, New College of California, San Francisco, and taught at New School for Social Research, New York City.
Now she is in residence at Bard College, in upstate New York. She has two daughters.
Awards
- Lannan Literary Fellowship (2007)
- Bard Fiction Prize (2005). (2006– )
- Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for best novel by an American Woman 2001
- Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2001
- Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2006
Works
- Meidav, Edie (2001). The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-618-21916-2. (reprint Harcourt, 2002, ISBN 978-0-618-21916-2 )
- Meidav, Edie (2005). Crawl Space. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-13075-6. (reprint Macmillan, 2006, ISBN 978-0-312-42575-3)
- Meidav, Edie (2011). Lola California. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-374-70887-0.
Criticism
- "The Truth in Rented Rooms". The Village Voice. January 19, 1999.
Reviews
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 even its sometimes predictable plot is finally justified by Meidav's scarifying emotional honesty and visceral sense of place.
But while Meidav's lens is panoramic, she manages to keep her focus human in scale, providing her readers with a virtual novelistic treatise on the colonial experience, articulated in the accumulated tiny, believable details of her characters' daily lives.