The Likely World
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 into her driveway and her heart surges. However, when Mellie's pursuit of this man and the past they may share threatens her sponsor, Mellie will have to put her tiny family and her recovery at risk in hopes of saving the woman who saved her first.
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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
