On Road Trips and the Rapture: An Interview With Mary Miller

I’ve been an admirer of Mary Miller’s fiction ever since I read 2009’s Big World, a taut and potent collection that fell firmly in the “buy copies for literary-minded friends” vein. Miller’s first novel, The Last Days of California, follows four members of a family as they travel from the Southeast to California by car in anticipation of the coming Rapture. The novel’s teenage narrator, however, is less concerned with theological matters and more focused on the quotidian concerns of young […]

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Best of 2009: Books

Tobias Carroll’s picks Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem Midnight Picnic by Nick Antosca Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler AM/PM by Amelia Gray Lowboy by John Wray The Other City by Michal Ajvaz Asta in the Wings by Jan Elizabeth Watson Between Jan Elizabeth Watson’s novel of a brother and sister raised in isolation and Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, this was a good year for novels evoking childhood. Both Watson and Whitehead deftly suggest their narrators’ adult destinies with a few […]

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