Maryse Meijer

Harvard Book Store welcomes MARYSE MEIJER, the acclaimed author of Heartbreaker, for a discussion of her latest work of fiction, Northwood: A Novella.

About Northwood

Part fairy tale, part horror story, Northwood is a genre-breaking novella told in short, brilliant, beautifully strange passages. The narrator, a young woman, has fled to the forest to pursue her artwork in isolation. While there, she falls in love with a married man she meets at a country dance. The man is violent, their affair even more so. As she struggles to free herself, she questions the difference between desire and obsession―and the brutal nature of intimacy. Packaged with a cover and endpapers by famed English artist Rufus Newell and inventive, white-on-black text treatments by award-winning designer Jonathan Yamakami, Northwood is a work of art as well as a literary marvel.

Praise

"Northwood’s mesmerizing alchemy is this: pain + desire + the deep, dark woods = a book so addictive you will inhale it in one breath. Meijer has made her own form, something new and wide-open, something as blissful and broken as the language of lovesickness itself." ―Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark

"This strange and beautiful novella has everything I want: formal play, myths and fairy tales, the politics of art-making, the all-obliterating power and complexity of desire, a cabin in the woods. I can’t wait to see what Maryse Meijer does next.” ―Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties

“With all the precision, concision, and mystery of an essential Grimms’ fairy tale, the stunning passages in Mayrse Meijer’s Northwood lure us down wooded paths where woodcutter, bear, fox, moth, and lover allure and menace. The woman inside these pages draws a world as inevitable, endangered, and necessary as any Gretel or Snow White. Count me a fan of this original writer.” ―Victoria Redel, author of Before Everything and Make Me Do Things