#jonathan miles

[pithia]

Anyone who's ever read the lyrics of an already cherished song has most likely encountered that hollow sensation of something missing, the absence of certain emotional integers. It can be like viewing a loved one's X-rays.

Jonathan Miles

[nochargebookbunch]

What Do I Read Next?

What Do I Read Next?

At a recent conference Random House representatives Steve Atinksy and Wade Lucas offered a list of books to read.

   At the top of their list was John Boyne’s The Hearts Invisible Furies, a 2014 publication with good reviews but not a popular following.  Their teaser might be enough for you to find this tormented Irish tale:

“Boyne’s new novel opens in the small west Cork village of Goleen, in…

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[siriuslygrimm]

Ambulatory Anomaly

#BOOKREVIEW - Ambulatory Anomaly - #AnatomyOfAMiracle #blog

Somethings happen in life that we can’t really explain. In Jonathan Miles’ Anatomy of a Miracle, one paralyzed man’s ability to walk again seems to defy scientific and spiritual explanation.

After being hit with shrapnel in the line of duty in Afghanistan, Cameron Harris returned home to Biloxi, Mississippi as a paraplegic who his sister Tanya looked after. When visiting the local store near…

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[art2catch]

… wondering, not for the first time, if there was a kind of dark bliss built into dementia: an immunity from death and abandonment, a way of fixing a point in time so that nothing can change, nothing can be rewritten, no one can leave.

- Jonathan Miles (Want Not)

[lovelyhandwrittennotes]

Leo & Doris

Just finished reading Want Not by Jonathan Miles, a three-story-line novel entwined primarily by the many connotations of “waste.” Quite elegant and thoughtful on a subject that is neither. 

As well as its thematic layering, Want Not’s strength is its complex characters. They’re all messed up/wrong/damaged, but all have their moments of being totally convincing/right/personally strong. So there’s no overall siding with one character over another, and the written perspective constantly shifts.

The reader’s split sympathies are pulled in a scene involving letters. The letters appear in the story-line of a righteous freegan squatter couple, Micah and Tal. Their minimalist existence is challenged when Tal’s old friend, reckless bro Matty, moves in. 

Excerpt from page 334:

With a laptop, he thought, life would be different. He could watch movies instead of captively listening to Micah wank that goddamn banjo or, worse, in the evenings, listening to her and Tal read aloud from a trove of ancient letters they’d scrounged from that nursing-home dumpster. His insides would go flopping when he’d see one of them tweezing a letter from that foot-long wooden box on the sidetable. Half of them were written on gray Red Cross stationery that was so thin you could almost see through it. Tal liked to stress that they were from World War II--”combat letters,” he’d say--as if the minor balls of that fact outweighed the extraordinary pussy-ness of the letters’ content. To Matty it was awful beyond compare: “Does she comprehend the made depth of my devotion?” Talmadge would read, in character, as the Leo to Micah’s Doris. “Does she think of me as I think of my Doris, restlessly, hungrily, so constantly that even sleep and combat are no’--I can’t...is it, repair? No, reprieve-- ‘are no reprieve? When she thinks of the future does she see only me, as I see only her? Not only me versus other men, no no no, but me versus everything. Me only, the way the moon covers the sun in an eclipse.’” And then would come Micah, fifty times worse: “ ‘In my eyes there is only Leo Vakolyuk.’” (”Leer Vac-you-luck,” in her hillbilly pronunciation.) “I breathe you, I hear you, I am more closely attached to you than I am to God (you will object to this but I can only speak heart’s truth). You say I am brave. I am not! It’s just that my fears are all concentrated. Facing a day without a letter from you, facing the thought of losing you--this and only this is what produced genuine terror.’” Because Micah objected to Matty sticking his finger down his throat to pantomime retching, he’d taken to plugging in his earbuds to drown the readings with scads of Russian death-metal. But you could only endure so much of chainsmoking while watching human beings--one of them, for fuck’s sake, your old ace boon coon, your best friend--melting themselves down to pathetic candlelit puddles via their self-enacted dumpster soap opera.

Despicable Matty is totally right, it sounds excruciating! I’d rather listen to Russian death-metal too. But unlike Matty, I can appreciate that these are the words of real people in love, written privately, not written to be judged. And props go to Micah and Tal for rescuing the historic trove from the trash. 

--Allison of LHNotes 

[thelibrettoproject]

A theme by Arian Saleh for Want Not by Jonathan Miles.

www.amazon.com/Want-Not-Jonathan…les/dp/0547352204

[selfportrait-in-an-inkblot]

Is the end of love an implosion or an explosion?

Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles

[selfportrait-in-an-inkblot]

To translate a literary work is to make love to a woman who will always be in love with someone else. You can ravish her, worship her, even ruin her; but she’ll never be yours to possess.

Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles