In Miller's new collection, a tipsy glow surrounds her Southern women as they trawl for cocktails, honk-tonk music, and men while nursing an inner ache they can't booze away. In lucid, vivid prose, Miller renders them alive to lust and, however improbably, to love.
Somewhere between the old trope of the fallen woman and the unctuousness of the likable heroine, the young narrators of Miller's searching stories inhabit the middle space known as reality. . . . Anyone who's faltered on the way to success and contentment might find solace in the do-gooder in "Big Bad Love," or the boozy, boyfriend-enabled composition teacher in the title story.--Boris Kachka
Some of the women in this collection of short stories are spiraling; some are simply stuck. But they all have one thing in common: relationships in varying degrees of WTF? We can relate.
Readers will find themselves riveted...The 16 stories in this collection...feel both homey and exotic, limning lives at once familiar and distinctly their own. Like a two-for-one drink special or a boxful of beer, this bracingly strong collection may prove intoxicating.
I fell into this book like it was a night of drinking. I sipped, I laughed, I had some more, I got lonely, I danced a little, I downed the rest, I wanted to cry, I stayed up late closing it out and I'm a wreck and I regret nothing.--Daniel Handler, author of We Are Pirates and Why We Broke Up
Enjoyable...a meditation on the stories a person tells herself.--Hilary Moss
Deftly crafted.--Joyce Carol Oates
Each of these stories has its own pulse. For anyone who's ever looked for love in all the wrong places, this shoebox full of beating hearts is for you.--Amelia Gray, author of Gutshot: Stories
Stunning.--Elizabeth Taylor
Taken as a whole, this harrowing yet ultimately enjoyable collection is less about the conventions of storytelling--exposition, climax, denouement--and more of a meditation on the stories a person tells herself.--Martha Sheridan
Stellar.
The proximity to [Miller's] characters that her crystalline, unfiltered prose allows...will draw readers in immediately, and entirely.