One Shard

An alphabet of answers to imaginable questions:

A: Toronto.
B. New York, Cuba, France, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka.
C. A former director of the MFA program at New College on Valencia Street in San Francisco, writer-in-residence at Bard College, and now at the UMass Amherst MFA program.
D. Sea monkeys.
E. Language indeed a virus.
F. Ms., The Village Voice, Guernica, Artweek, The International Literary Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, Terra Nova, The American Voice, New Letters, Conjunctions and elsewhere.
G. A Lannan Fellowship, a Howard Fellowship, a Bard Fiction Prize for Writers Under 40, Whiting research award, a Kafka Award for Best Novel by an American Woman, a Fulbright in Sri Lanka, Fulbright in Cyprus, Northern California Book Award shortlist, and other citations.
H. Books called editorial picks by the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Electric Review, the Litblog Coop and elsewhere.
I. Overeducated women with a past; autodidact boys, occasionally scarred, often grown into men.
J. Ocean.
K. Children.
L. Unterzakhn; The Map and the Territory; looking for Tanizaki.
M. Shange, Angelou, Woolf, Hardy, Faulkner, Morrison, Kundera, Paley, Baldwin, Flaubert, Rushdie, Cavafy, Lorca, Cortazar, Transtromer, Vallejo, Stendhal, Ishiguro, Coetzee, Jackson.
N. Poetry.
O. Generosity.
P. Spanish and French, German and Sinhala, Hebrew, some Catalan, Greek, Portuguese, Italian.
Q. One obsessive score for each book.
R. The stress of routine.
S. Loss of the perceiving mind.

More formally...

Edie Meidav is the author of KINGDOM OF THE YOUNG, a collection of short fiction with a nonfiction coda, as well as these novels: LOLA,CALIFORNIA (FSG); CRAWL SPACE (FSG); THE FAR FIELD: A NOVEL OF CEYLON (Houghton). Her work has been recognized with the Bard Fiction Prize, the Kafka Prize for Best Novel, and year-end editors' picks, as well as support from the Fulbright Program, the Howard Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and more. She is a senior editor at the journal Conjunctions and teaches in the UMass Amherst MFA program, where she founded and advises the Radius MFA project. She has served as a judge for the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Award, the Juniper Prize, Howard, the PEN/Bingham Prize, and elsewhere.