Another Love Discourse

A lyric novel about the play of grief, empathy, new and old love, and the quest to overcome blindness in human relations.
 

Caught in the cross-currents of a fraught divorce and a new love, the death of her mother, and a global pandemic, a writer plunges into an obsession with the work of 1960s French philosopher Roland Barthes. Her struggles to make sense of his work and life—and of what can happen to a woman's settled life in a single harrowing year—result in an engrossing, funny, earthy, and innovative lyric work. The quest for authenticity in motherhood, sexuality, and tenancy on the earth and in the home, as well as the unusual lyric form, make the novel unified in spirit yet transdisciplinary in approach.
 "Philosophically rigorous, narratively rich, and a pleasure to read and reread."
—Nina Schuyler, The Millions

"A richly innovative book. The quest for authenticity in motherhood, sexuality, and tenancy on the earth and in the home, as well as the unusual lyric form, make the novel unified in spirit yet transdisciplinary in approach."
—Anne McGrath, Bomb Magazine"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."
—Bradford Morrow

"Edie Meidav is one of my favorite contemporary writers, and this is her best book. It’s open, wounded, true."
—Rick Moody

"Another Love Discourse is an uncategorizable triumph, and a gesture of radical intimacy with the reader, one of which Barthes would be proud."
—Jonathan Lethem, author of The Arrest

"A lush plunge into the sensorium: marriage, divorce, discovery. Meidav turns her fierce intellect to timeless questions of love, its attendant ecstasy and delicious pain. This book will unlock you."
—Margot Douaihy, author of Scorched Cross

"This ruthlessly poetic novel does something I’ve never seen before: it pulls rarefied literary theory down into the gritty canyons of heartbreak and fear. One of the most original, most unlikely, and most devastating books I’ve ever come across."
—David Hollander, author of Anthropica

"Another Love Discourse shatters boundaries and expectations: Meidav’s narrative voice—urgent, lyrical, raw—compels the reader into uncommon and intense intimacy. This powerful book will stay with you."
—Claire Messud, author of A Dream LifeCalled an “American original,” Edie Meidav is the author of the prose collection Kingdom of the Young, and novels including Lola, California, and Crawl Space. Her previous work has been recognized by the Bard Fiction Prize and the Kafka Prize, as well as support from the Fulbright Program, the Howard Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation. A senior editor at the journal Conjunctions, she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.