Kingdom of the Young: Stories

by Edie Meidav

Overview

“A series of dreamy, complex, poignant stories with language that is by turns gauzy-poetic and pinpoint-precise but unfailingly inventive.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
The dynamic characters in Kingdom of the Young are searching: for adventure, work, love, absolution, better chances elsewhere. A fanatical child army loses faith in its commander as he ages unforgivably into his thirties. A woman possessed with wanderlust and a small inheritance seeks love among the cave-dwelling Roma in Granada. Traumatized war veterans run local rackets; smarmy bureaucrats rise through the ranks of repressive regimes; civilians attempt to escape the stranglehold of life under dictatorships.
 
From the honeycombed caves outside the Alhambra to the streets of Havana, from hospital wards to quinceañera parties, these stories—along with the collection’s illuminating nonfiction coda—testify to the vast imaginative range of an author who has won a Kafka and a Whiting Award among other literary prizes.
 
“Ambitious, original, deliciously philosophical. Kingdom of the Young invites comparison to the crônicas of Clarice Lispector and the fabulas of Italo Calvino.” —Carolyn Cooke, author of Daughters of the Revolution

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941411421
Publisher:	Sarabande Books
Publication date:	04/11/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	490 KB

About the Author

Edie Meidav is the author of three novels—The Far Field, Crawl Space, and Lola, California. Her honors include a Lannan Literary Award, the Kafka Award for Best Novel by an American Woman, the Bard Fiction Prize, a Whiting Award, and a Howard Fellowship. She teaches in the University of Massachusetts MFA program and lives in Amherst.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Believers
Kingdom of the Young
Romance, or, Blind in Granada
The King of Bubbles
The Buddha of the Vedado

Knaves
Quinceañera
Beef
Catullus
I Never Had Any Problem with You
The Golden Rule, or, I am only trying to do the right thing
Modern Parables #1: Theft

Dreamers
Dog’s Journey
Koi
Talent
The Christian Girl

Coda
Questions of Travel
Daughter of California

Editorial Reviews

In certain literary corners, style may be a dirty word, but not in Meidav's stylistically virtuosic collection…Meidav favors long, looping sentences as full of life as her characters…The collection ends with a nonfiction coda that doesn't decode or deepen the stories so much as rework some of their themes (youth and adventure, age and memory) in two thoughtful essays. If it feels unnecessary, it's only because the short stories in this collection stand tall enough on their own.

The New York Times Book Review - Lincoln Michel

"A probing and deeply ruminative cross-genre odyssey. Meidav pulls readers through a series of dreamy, complex, poignant stories with language that is by turns gauzy-poetic and pinpoint-precise but unfailingly inventive.... A penetrating collection that glides among an impressive breadth of storytelling modes with warmth and easy brilliance."
— Kirkus Reviews , starred review

“Ambitious, original, deliciously philosophical.  Kingdom of the Young  invites comparison to the crônicas of Clarice Lispector and the fabulas of Italo Calvino.”
—Carolyn Cooke, author of  Daughters of the Revolution

 
“These stories are dazzling, full of knowledge of the world and of the heart, and written with the pluck and thrum of a flamenco guitarist. Meidav draws you into world after world; she makes you want to sit by your window and listen all night.”
—Paul La Farge, author of Luminous Airplanes

"Oh what imagination. Oh what story-telling. What beautiful language. What more do you want? Go ahead and be greedy like me. Meidav, a prose stylist of the first rank, has got us covered."
—Mitchell S. Jackson, author of The Residue Years  

  “Edie Meidav’s writing is a cascade of fireworks. Her ideas are little bombs—and these stories, fast-spinning sparklers. Her hallucinatory prose flares with color and heart.”
—Leela Corman, author of  Unterzakhn

“An alchemist of empathy, of nuanced observation and unexpected truths, Edie Meidav is a writer whose every magical story probes human experience from triumphs to tragedies and all the terrain between.  Kingdom of the Young  is nothing short of masterful, the work of a born storyteller in full, glorious voice.” 
—Bradford Morrow, author of  The Forgers

“In  Kingdom of the Young , whether Edie Meidav riffs on Cuban dogs or ‘a tiny pert woman in a cherry tracksuit’ called Hummingbird, she unfurls a mean sentence.... A collection of surprises, with a sparkling nonfiction coda.”
—Terese Svoboda, author of Live Sacrifice

“I loved this book. Her stories and essays make a whole—a brilliant pairing, each part informing the other, with mutual gravitas and depth.”
—Daniel Wallace, author of  Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions

“ Kingdom of the Young  will engage readers for its clear authority, musical language and surprising empathy.”
—Gary Shteyngart, author of Little Failure  and Super Sad True Love Story
 

" Kingdom of the Young  is masterfully written. With deep and uncanny empathy, Meidav penetrates to the heart of her characters. The writing is a pleasure to read, ranging widely but always urgent and original, with streaks of sly humor."
—Sharon Guskin, author of  The Forgetting Time

“In every single bit of Meidav’s work, the prose is dazzling. Reading  Kingdom of the Young , I was often reminded of two of my favorite writers, Nabokov and Gass.” 
—Rene Steinke, author of Holy Skirts , finalist for the National Book Award

From the Publisher

★ 2017-01-23
A probing and deeply ruminative cross-genre odyssey.Meidav (Lola, California, 2012, etc.) pulls readers through a series of dreamy, complex, poignant stories with language that is by turns gauzy-poetic and pinpoint-precise but unfailingly inventive. Divided into three sections of short fiction, "Believers," "Dreamers," and "Knaves," the book ends with a coda of two touching and philosophically expansive essays, which, by their curious inclusion, stand as tacit commentary on the membranes of varying thickness and toughness between the fictive and the "real"; the permeability of each to the other. In the first of the two, "Questions of Travel," Meidav recalls, among other things, a visit to Parc Güell in Barcelona, which greatly diverged from both the memory of a previous visit and from the glittering image of a postcard that inspired the trip at hand. The story picks at a thread that runs throughout the tales that precede it, of the disparity between perception and memory and experience, between gloss and exegesis, image and analysis. In "Quinceañera," Meidav dives deep into the complications and bittersweetness of the decline and demise of a passionate childhood friendship, the messiness and roving loyalties of youth, exploring the disappointments and stagnation of the now-grown narrator, the entanglements of responsibility, and "how blame alone can basically embalm you for life." In "The Buddha of the Vedado," a young woman waits for her charismatic boyfriend to get out of prison so they can marry and start a family, amid other deprivations of latter-day Cuba. In another, "Beef," a Southern swindler who supports his cancer-stricken mother invades unsuspecting people's homes, forcing freezers full of meat upon them and quickly extracting payment, until a couple he's marked as easy targets swoops down in an act of retribution like the hand of Flannery O'Connor herself. A penetrating collection that glides among an impressive breadth of storytelling modes with warmth and easy brilliance.

Kirkus Reviews