The Likely World

Description

Twenty years of addiction to cloud, a drug which wipes the user's short-term memory, have left single mom Mellie with her mind in fragments. With the help of a tough-minded sponsor, and motivated by her own medically-challenged daughter, Mellie clings to a fragile sobriety. Then, on the evening of her twenty-ninth day sober, a stranger pulls int

Melanie Conroy-Goldman is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges where she was a founding director of the Trias Residency for Writers, which has hosted such notables as Mary Gaitskill, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Jeff VanderMeer. Her fiction has been published in journals such as Southern Review and StoryQuarterly, in anthologies from Morrow and St. Martin's, and online at venues such as McSweeney's. She also volunteers at a maximum security men's prison with the Cornell Prison Education Program. Her work is represented by Bill Clegg at the Clegg Agency. She lives in Ithaca, New York with her husband, daughter, and step-daughters.

"Conroy-Goldman's gritty street postmodernism will rewire your brain in ways that recall David Foster Wallace or Philip K. Dick. But it's the depth of feeling here, about love, about motherhood, reminiscent of Rachel Kushner or Claire Vaye Watkins, that will break your heart." -Peter Ho Davies "The Likely World is bizarre and beautiful, equal parts brainy lit and gut-bucket pulp. Its heroine is unlike any female character I've ever encountered and I love her." -Mary Gaitskill "Inside the strata of motherhood and memory a pulse throbs, a rhythm around a body that won't quit asking: Who are you? Where are you? Why? The woman at the center of The Likely World vibrates between addiction, memory, nostalgia, and being in a future landscape about ten seconds from our present tense. To be sober in The Likely World is to risk having heart again; to be fully alive is to risk having your heart broken open. I love this mother. I love this daughter. I love this revision of what we mean when we say family-fragmenting its way into the future one glorious mind flip at a time. I fucking love this book." -Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Verge "I don't know if you'll ever read a literary novel like The Likely World this or any other year. It's groovy, badass smart, and totally trippy, but also full of heartache and longing and the woundings of love. This novel absolutely sparkles with brightness and life." -Chang-rae Lee, author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction "This book takes risks, and for that I am thankful. The complex depictions of motherhood and childhood colliding with a disturbingly tempting memory-wiping drug make this novel special and unforgettable." -Lindsay Lerman of Lit Reactor A "propulsive debut . . . [where] themes of motherhood, love, and addiction collide in heartbreaking and dangerous ways. . . [T]he prose is exquisite . . . This skillful twist on the addiction narrative is worth a look." -Publishers Weekly "Conroy-Goldman's postmodern novel beautifully speaks to the complexity of real life and addiction. Similar to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, it's a novel about addiction with an affinity for the strangeness of modern life, an investigation into modern brains, which are treated as computers with intricate and complex webs of synapses." -Alexis David, North of Oxford