Mesha Maren Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Anthologies

Mesha Maren is a published author.

Mesha writes full length novels, essays, and short stories. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications. these include Southern Culture, Oxford American, Tin House, Hobart, Harper Perennial’s Forty Stories, and more.

Mesha is also the recipient of a number of literary prizes and awards. These include a grant in 2014 from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the fiction prize in 2015 (Thomas Wolfe), a writing fellowship gifted to her from the Lincoln Memorial University, as well as fellowships from the Ucross Foundation and MacDowell Colony.

The author has also had the pleasure of being at Chapel Hill at U.N.C. as a Kenan Visiting Writer in 2018 to 2019. She is also a writing fellow at Beckley Federal Correctional Institution.

One of Maren’s short stories was published on its own in 2014. She followed that up with a full length work of fiction in 2019 with the release of her debut fictional novel. It is titled Sugar Run.

Under the Valley is a short story written by Mesha Maren. It originally came out for the first time in a literary journal titled Day One. The weekly journal is dedicated to showing poetry as well as short fiction from ’emerging writers’.

The story starts out with something as simple as a phone call. However, even a simple phone call can be the catalyst for a moment that changes your life forever. Such is the case for Theresa on a morning in August. When a phone call shatters the morning’s silence, she has no idea what is about to come.

One phone call and her entire world is about to shatter into pieces, and she doesn’t even know it yet. She is a married woman with a husband in the military, and this is the type of call that every spouse with someone actively serving dreads. No one ever wants to get what they could term ‘the call’.

The person on the other end informs her that Billy has been hurt. They were only recently married, and now she has found out that he got injured during his service in Iraq. The good news is that he is not dead, and she is informed that he will be coming home.

Even though he is coming back, just like so many other soldiers coming back fresh off of conflict, he is not coming home the same man that he left as. His homecoming is about to bring along with it so much more baggage than anyone could have anticipated.

This is not about to be an easy return for Billy or for Theresa. He is not only wounded on a physical level but a mental and emotional one too. This soldier may be keeping secrets as well. It is all very confusing for his wife, who fell in love with the man that she met and does not recognize the man that has returned.

She thinks back to the good days that they had in their marriage, and the change that she sees in him is confusing and even a little disappointing. They had made so many plans together. Each of them had known that they were so lucky and that was why they assumed that they had fallen in love. Now it seems that even that luck is changing.

Theresa is forced to sit back and watch when she isn’t doing what she can to care for her husband. She would be lying to herself if she said that she was not watching a decline. Now Theresa is put into the difficult position of making a choice that may come to impact her life and her husband’s life just as much.

If she stays with him, she has to accept that this may mean accepting the current decline and unhappiness in her husband for good. Can she stay in this marriage and adapt to the new person that her husband has become? It may end up meaning that she goes down with him as well. Or she can choose to take control of her life and go in a new direction.

Is there still hope when it comes to her marriage, or is Theresa going to have to start a new life on her own and save herself? Loyalties are tested and truths are revealed in this compelling work of short fiction from author Mesha Maren.

Sugar Run is the first full length fictional novel from Mesha Maren. If you loved her short story or are a general fan of great novels, check out this book for yourself!

The time and the year is 1989. Jodi McCarty is like every other teen her age, for the most part. She might be a little different in that she is 17 when she receives a life sentence in prison thanks to being found guilty on a charge of manslaughter.

It is 18 years later down the road when she finally is released. Life in prison turned out not to be her entire life after all. She ends up at a bus stop and doesn’t know what to think. The shock from being set free after being in prison for so long is sending her for a loop.

They say that it’s a common experience to be overwhelmed when you are released from prison. You go from having a set schedule to having way more freedom. This does not always include the freedom to travel out of state.

Since she can’t go to the Appalachian mountains, she decides to go looking for a person from her past instead. However, when she meets someone along the way, it may mean that she is detoured from her path.

Miranda is a young mother with troubles of her own, and Jodi feels that she is starting to fall for her. They attempt to start a new life together. But in a small town that is resistant to change in West Virginia, that’s going to be more difficult than perhaps either of them expected. Read this book to find out what happens in the end and whether Jodi will be able to start fresh or fail in the attempt to truly begin again.