Still Life with Meredith

by Ann Lewinson

Behind the glass windows of a storefront-turned-apartment, an art handler at a contemporary art museum sits among dead birds awaiting the return of her roommate, an emerging artist of growing notoriety. While she waits, she ransacks her past while discoursing on Dutch still life painting, the mating habits of her species and others, and the extreme measures taken by the French psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte to achieve sexual fulfillment.

This audacious burning match of a novella marks the debut of a writer of uncommon insight, boundless curiosity and mordant wit, whose jaundiced eye takes on the comic excesses of contemporary art and the multifariousness of bad sex in equal measure. Masterful in its breadth—at once funny, shocking and erudite—Still Life with Meredith contemplates the thin line that separates sanity from madness in a world that has a hard time telling the difference.

Genres: Fiction

102 pages, Paperback

First published March 4, 2020

About the author

Ann Lewinson is the author of Still Life with Meredith (Outpost19). Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Agni, Glass Tesseract, Hayden’s Ferry Review, In Tandem, Karamu, Out of Line, Pangolin Papers and MoMA PS1’s Special Projects Writers’ Series. Her play The Adventures of Comic Weekly Man: Encounter on Lookout Mountain, written while she was a 2014 fellow at the Edward F. Albee Foundation, received a staged reading in Emerging Artists Theatre's Spring 2018 New Works Series. She is also a journalist and film critic who has reviewed movies for ARTnews, The Boston Phoenix, The Hartford Advocate, The Kansas City Star and other newspapers. She has taught in the English department at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, and through the NY Writers Coalition has led workshops in supportive housing and for young adults with autism and other disabilities.

Reviews

[Lynette · Rating 5 out of 5]

This deceptively slim volume is a postmodernist romp through art, the 3 diamond test* and bodily fluids… one that I - being both squeamish and prudish - found deeply unsettling on several fronts. Some passages still haunt me to this day. The double-jointed ideaplay had me wait-whatting, re-reading then cursing the author that which cannot be unread. I loaned my copy to an art museum pal who has since struck me off her brunching ladies list. Is this a recommendation? I have no idea. Read at your own risk.

*When standing straight with legs together there should be three diamond shapes formed by the contours of the legs: between the ankles and the calf, between the calf and the knees, and between the knee and the upper thigh.

[Laura Zam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this novella, which I read in a couple of hours. A delightful couple of hours. I found the book to be erudite, angry, breezy, profound, funny, and really haunting. It left me with so many questions I didn't want answers to. I just wanted them to seep in, changing me. I feel changed by STILL LIFE WITH MEREDITH. Highly recommended.

[Jennifer Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dark (dark, dark; don’t read it if you can’t hang—it’ll haunt your sleep.) Another reviewer mentioned a similarity to the writing of Otessa Moshfegh; I thought so, too, at first, and I am a Moshfegh fan, but Lewinson leaves you longer in the deep, dank hole, to the point that you’re not sure the rescuers will be coming. :)

[Melanie Conroy-Goldman · Rating 5 out of 5]

For fans of Otessa Moshfegh, Lidia Yuknavitch, Sheila Heti. This novella is a brain-busting story of a self-quarantine that is crazier, funnier, and more weird than yours.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very appropriate reading for this time of self-isolation. “I have paused. I am pausing. I continue to pause.”

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe I read it too slowly or missed something crucial to thoroughly enjoying this provocative little book.