Big World
Short Flight/Long Drive Books, a publishing branch of the independent literary journal Hobart, has released Mary Miller's Big World, its second book and first piece of fiction. 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 father after their mother's death as in "Leak," 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. The gut-wrenching directness of Mary Miller's prose is evocative of Mary Gaitskill and Courtney Eldridge, if Gaitskill's and Eldridge's novels were set in the south and reeked of spilt beer and cigarette smoke.
