Want Not $26.00
New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin (2013)
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With his critically acclaimed first novel, “Dear American Airlines,” Jonathan Miles was widely praised as a comic genius whose fiction, as Richard Russo noted in the “New York Times Book Review,” was “not just philosophically but emotionally rewarding.”
Now, in “Want Not,” Miles takes a giant leap forward with this highly inventive and corrosively funny story of our times, a three-pronged tale of human excess that sifts through the detritus of several disparate lives, all conjoined in their come-hell-or-high-water search for fulfillment.
As the novel opens on Thanksgiving Day, readers are telescoped into the worlds of a freegan couple living off the grid in Manhattan, a once prominent linguist struggling with midlife, and a New Jersey debt-collection magnate with a second chance at getting things right. Want and desire propel each one forward on their paths toward something, anything “more,” but when their worlds collide, briefly, randomly, yet irrevocably, the weight of that wanting ultimately undoes each of them, leaving them to pick up the pieces from what’s left behind.
With a satirist’s eye and a romantic’s heart, Jonathan Miles captures the morass and comedy of contemporary life in all its excess. Bold, unblinking, unforgettable in its irony and pathos, “Want Not” is a wicked, big-hearted literary novel that confirms the arrival of a major voice in American fiction.
Dear American Airlines $35.00
New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin (2008)
From the cocktails columnist of the New York Times, the scathingly funny, deeply moving story of a stranded passenger whose enraged letter of complaint transforms into a lament for a life gone awry
Bennie Ford, a fifty-three-year-old failed poet turned translator, is traveling to his estranged daughter’s wedding when his flight is canceled. Stuck with thousands of fuming passengers in the purgatory of O’Hare Airport, he watches the clock tick and realizes that he will miss the ceremony. Frustrated, irate, and helpless, Bennie does the only thing he can: he starts to write a letter. But what begins as a hilariously excoriating demand for a refund soon becomes a cri de coeur of a life misspent, talent wasted, opportunities botched, and happiness lost. A man both sinned against and sinning, Bennie pens his letter in a voice that is a marvel of lacerating wit directed at himself and at others, heart-on-sleeve emotion, and wide-ranging erudition, underlined by a consistent groundnote of regret for the actions of a lifetime–and all of it is propelled by the fading hope that if he could just make it to the wedding, he might have a chance to do something right.
A margarita blend of outrage, wicked humor, vulnerability, intelligence,
and regret, Dear American Airlines gives new meaning to the
term “airport novel” and announces the emergence of a major new
talent in American fiction.