Total
Stories
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Rebecca Miller returns to short fiction for the first time since her prodigious collection of stories, Personal Velocity, with the arresting, darkly prescient Total.
From Dublin to Martha’s Vineyard, from the anxious comforts of motherhood to a technologically infected near future that mirrors today with dark prescience, each of the seven stories in Total is a world of its own, painted with vivid strokes, whose people and questions stay with the reader long after the story has ended. Joad, one of the first characters we meet, finds onionskin pages crammed in a locked desk drawer while refurbishing a Hudson Valley farmhouse; the terrifying words on the fragile paper haunt Joad and her husband, the woman who wrote them looming over the couple like a malevolent spirit. Her words embody the power of the act of creation and the insidious, untamable force of language once it has left one’s pen.
The author of The Private Lives of Pippa Lee and Jacob’s Folly, as well as an award-winning filmmaker, Miller has “the soaring eye of the epicist and the sly instinct of the satirist” (The New Yorker), and her talents are on full display in Total. Each voice and life captured in these haunting stories is unforgettable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Miller's alluring collection (after the novel Jacob's Folly), protagonists search for connection and pleasure in strange, sometimes destructive ways. Daphne in "Mrs. Covet" is a mother of two, pregnant with a third. The family hires a cleaning lady named Nat, hoping for some order, but after Nat moves in, something disastrous happens. In the speculative title story, people have transcendent phone sex on devices called Total Phones, and the force field of an early version of the phone leads to birth defects (most "Total children" die from unknown causes by the age of eight or nine). Roxanne, 16, hatches a plan to break her younger sister, E, eight, from the Total Care Center where she's lived since her infancy, and devastating consequences ensue. In "She Came to Me," Ciaran, an Irish writer who has remained faithful to his wife of 18 years, struggles with writer's block and decides to seek out everyday stories in Dublin. He meets a young American woman who professes to be a romantic (and admits to having been a stalker). They go to her room, where he has second thoughts about having sex with her, though they do anyway. Miller brings a cinematic eye to her descriptions (a parking garage's "final floor" offers a "vivid sky") and plenty of drama to the situations. These stories are full of surprises.
