Books by Mary Miller
Always Happy Hour: Stories
by Mary Miller
"I adore Mary Miller's stories and you will too. Read this book and then read her others. Like, now." ―Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
Combining hard-edged prose and savage Southern charm, Mary Miller showcases biting contemporary talent at its best. Fast on the heels of her "terrific" (New York Times Book Review) debut novel, The Last Days of California, she now reaches new heights with this collection of shockingly relatable, ill-fated love stories.
Acerbic and ruefully funny, Always Happy Hour weaves tales of young women―deeply flawed and intensely real―who struggle to get out of their own way. They love to drink and have sex; they make bad decisions with men who either love them too much or too little; and they haunt a Southern terrain of gas stations, public pools, and dive bars. Though each character shoulders the weight of her own baggage―whether it’s a string of horrible exes, a boyfriend with an annoying child, or an inability to be genuinely happy for a best friend―they are united in their unrelenting suspicion that they deserve better.
These women seek understanding in the most unlikely places: a dilapidated foster home where love is a liability in "Big Bad Love," a trailer park littered with a string of bad decisions in "Uphill," and the unfamiliar corners of a dream home purchased with the winnings of a bitter divorce settlement in "Charts." Taking a microscope to delicate patterns of love and intimacy, Miller evokes the reticent love among the misunderstood, the gritty comfort in bad habits that can’t be broken, and the beat-by-beat minutiae of fated relationships.
Like an evening of drinking, Always Happy Hour is a comforting burn, warm and intoxicating in its brutal honesty. In an unforgettable style that distinguishes her within her generation, Miller once again captures womanhood in "a raw…and heartbreaking way" (Los Angeles Review of Books) and solidifies her essential role in American fiction.
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Always Happy Hour: Stories
by Mary Miller
“Sleek, sexy, slyly funny.” ―Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
A “bracingly strong” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) collection brimming with savage Southern charm, Always Happy Hour propels Mary Miller to new heights. Claustrophobic and lonesome, acerbic and magnetic, her characters seek understanding in the most unlikely places―a dilapidated foster home where love is a liability, a trailer park laden with a history of bad decisions, and the empty corners of a dream home bought after a bitter divorce. “Full of wit, bite, and the boundless intelligence of their author” (Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds), these stories evoke the particular gritty comfort found in bad habits as hope turns to dust, and they prove yet again Miller’s essential role in American fiction.
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$15.95
Biloxi: A Novel
by Mary Miller
Mary Miller seizes the mantle of southern literature with Biloxi, a tender, gritty tale of middle age and the unexpected turns a life can take. Building on her critically acclaimed novel The Last Days of California and her biting collection Always Happy Hour, Miller transports readers to this delightfully wry, unapologetic corner of the south―Biloxi, Mississippi, home to sixty-three-year-old Louis McDonald, Jr.
Louis has been forlorn since his wife of thirty-seven years left him, his father passed, and he impulsively retired from his job in anticipation of an inheritance check that may not come. These days he watches reality television and tries to avoid his ex-wife and daughter, benefiting from the charity of his former brother-in-law, Frank, who religiously brings over his Chili’s leftovers and always stays for a beer.
Yet the past is no predictor of Louis’s future. On a routine trip to Walgreens to pick up his diabetes medication, he stops at a sign advertising free dogs and meets Harry Davidson, a man who claims to have more than a dozen canines on offer, but offers only one: an overweight mixed breed named Layla. Without any rational explanation, Louis feels compelled to take the dog home, and the two become inseparable. Louis, more than anyone, is dumbfounded to find himself in love―bursting into song with improvised jingles, exploring new locales, and reevaluating what he once considered the fixed horizons of his life.
With her “sociologist’s eye for the mundane and revealing” (Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books), Miller populates the Gulf Coast with Ann Beattie-like characters. A strangely heartwarming tale of loneliness, masculinity, and the limitations of each, Biloxi confirms Miller’s position as one of our most gifted and perceptive writers.
Copies
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$24.95
Biloxi: A Novel
by Mary Miller
Mary Miller seizes the mantle of southern literature with Biloxi, a tender, gritty tale of middle age and the unexpected turns a life can take. Building on her critically acclaimed novel The Last Days of California and her biting collection Always Happy Hour, Miller transports readers to this delightfully wry, unapologetic corner of the south―Biloxi, Mississippi, home to sixty-three-year-old Louis McDonald, Jr.
Louis has been forlorn since his wife of thirty-seven years left him, his father passed, and he impulsively retired from his job in anticipation of an inheritance check that may not come. These days he watches reality television and tries to avoid his ex-wife and daughter, benefiting from the charity of his former brother-in-law, Frank, who religiously brings over his Chili’s leftovers and always stays for a beer.
Yet the past is no predictor of Louis’s future. On a routine trip to Walgreens to pick up his diabetes medication, he stops at a sign advertising free dogs and meets Harry Davidson, a man who claims to have more than a dozen canines on offer, but offers only one: an overweight mixed breed named Layla. Without any rational explanation, Louis feels compelled to take the dog home, and the two become inseparable. Louis, more than anyone, is dumbfounded to find himself in love―bursting into song with improvised jingles, exploring new locales, and reevaluating what he once considered the fixed horizons of his life.
With her “sociologist’s eye for the mundane and revealing” (Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books), Miller populates the Gulf Coast with Ann Beattie-like characters. A strangely heartwarming tale of loneliness, masculinity, and the limitations of each, Biloxi confirms Miller’s position as one of our most gifted and perceptive writers.
Copies
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$15.95
The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court: Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak (The William and Bettye Nowlin Series in Art, History, and Culture of the Western Hemisphere)
by Mary Miller, Claudia Brittenham
Located within the deep tropical rainforest of Chiapas, Mexico, the Maya site of Bonampak is home to the most complete and magnificent mural program of the ancient Americas. In three rooms, a pageant of rulership opens up, scene by scene, like pages of an ancient Maya book. Painted c. AD 800, the murals of Bonampak reveal a complex and multifaceted view of the ancient Maya at the end of their splendor during the last days of the Classic era. Members of the royal court engage in rituals and perform human sacrifice, dance in extravagant costumes and strip the clothing from fallen captives, acknowledge foreign nobles, and receive abundant tribute. The murals are a powerful and sophisticated reflection on the spectacle of courtly life and the nature of artistic practice, a window onto a world that could not know its doomed future.
This major new study of the paintings of Bonampak incorporates insights from decades of art historical, epigraphic, and technical investigation of the murals, framing questions about artistic conception, facture, narrative, performance, and politics. Lavishly illustrated, this book assembles thorough documentation of the Bonampak mural program, from historical photographs of the paintings―some never before published―to new full-color reconstructions by artist Heather Hurst, recipient of a MacArthur award, and Leonard Ashby. The book also includes a catalog of photographs, infrared images, and line drawings of the murals, as well as images of all the glyphic texts, which are published in their entirety for the first time. Written in an engaging style that invites both specialists and general readers alike, this book will stand as the definitive presentation of the paintings for years to come.
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Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya
by Mary Miller, Simon Martin, Kathleen Berrin
Written by leading authorities and including thirteen personal accounts of the latest ground-breaking research, Courtly Arts of the Ancient Maya examines the royal courts and their art in unprecedented depth. Color photographs and specially commissioned drawings reveal a dazzling array of objects that still have the power to engage and astonish observers centuries after their creation.
The book investigates the rise in the importance of the court, its mythical backdrop, the role of women and the place of warfare. The works of artists and scribes - ceramic censers, stucco heads, jade masks, terracotta figurines, stone boxes, and great carved limestone lintels - bring alive the form, texture, and color of their vanished world.
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The Last Days of California
by Mary Miller
A teenage girl and her unraveling family travel cross-country in preparation for the Rapture in this radiant, highly anticipated debut. Fifteen-year-old Jess is on a road trip to the end of the world. Her evangelical father has packed up the family and left their Montgomery, Alabama, home behind to drive west in anticipation of the rapture, hoping to save as many souls as possible before the imminent Second Coming. With her long-suffering mother and her rebellious sister Elise, Jess hands out tracts to nonbelievers at every rest stop, Waffle House, and gas station along the way. Through sticky diners and in crowded motel pools, beneath bleached bedspreads and in the backseat of the family car, Jess and Elise whisper and squabble their way across the country. But as doomsday approaches, Jess can't seem to work up any real fear about the apocalypse when her sister's secret pregnancy and their increasingly frayed parents loom so much larger.
In this fresh and razor-sharp debut novel, teenage angst and evangelical ardor make a pilgrimage across an endlessly interchangeable American landscape of highways, motels, and strip malls. Sporting a "King Jesus Returns!" t-shirt and well stocked with end-times pamphlets, Jess makes semi-earnest efforts to believe but is thwarted at every turn by a string of familiar and yet freshly rendered teenage obsessions. From "Will the world end?" to "Will I ever fall in love?" each tender worry, big and small, is brilliantly rendered with emotional weight. Mary Miller reinvents the classic American literary road-trip story, reviving its august traditions with the yearning and spiritual ennui of twenty-first-century adolescence. As the last day approaches, Jess's teenage myopia gradually gives way to a growing awareness of the painful undercurrents of her fractured family.
With a deadpan humor and a savage charm that belie a deep sympathy for her characters, Miller captures the gnawing uneasiness, sexual rivalry, and escalating self-doubt of teenage life in America, where the end always seems nigh and our illusions are necessary protections against that which we can't control.
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The Last Days of California
by Mary Miller
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection
Longlisted for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Book Prize
“[A] terrific first novel. . . . Why worry about labeling a book this good? Just read it.” ―Laurie Muchnick, New York Times Book Review Jess is fifteen years old and waiting for the world to end. Her evangelical father has packed up the family to drive west to California, hoping to save as many souls as possible before the Second Coming. With her long-suffering mother and rebellious (and secretly pregnant) sister, Jess hands out tracts to nonbelievers at every rest stop, Waffle House, and gas station along the way. As Jess’s belief frays, her teenage myopia evolves into awareness about her fracturing family. Selected as a Barnes & Noble Discover pick and an Indie Next pick, Mary Miller’s radiant debut novel reinvigorates the literary road-trip story with wry vulnerability and savage charm.
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$14.95
Big World
by Mary Miller
Fiction. Mary Miller's BIG WORLD is the second book and first work of fiction to come out of Short Flight/Long Drive Books, a publishing arm of the independent literary journal Hobart. The characters in Mary Miller's debut short story collection BIG WORLD are at once autonomous and lonesome, possessing both a longing to connect with those around them and a cynicism regarding their ability to do so, whether they're holed up in a motel room in Pigeon Forge with an air gun shooting boyfriend as in "Fast Trains" or navigating the rooms of their house with their dad after their mother's death as in "Leak." Mary Miller's writing is unapologetically honest and efficient and the gut-wrenching directness of her prose is reminiscent of Mary Gaitskill and Courtney Eldridge, if Gaitskill's and Eldridge's stories were set in the south and reeked of spilt beer and cigarette smoke.
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No copies available.