Fiction. Mary Miller's BIG WORLD is the second book and first work of fiction to come out of Short Flight/Long Drive Books, a publishing arm of the independent literary journal Hobart. 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, 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 dad after their mother's death as in "Leak." Mary Miller's writing is unapologetically honest and efficient and the gut-wrenching directness of her prose is reminiscent of Mary Gaitskill and Courtney Eldridge, if Gaitskill's and Eldridge's stories were set in the south and reeked of spilt beer and cigarette smoke.

Author City: AUSTIN, TX USA

Mary Miller is the author of a story collection, BIG WORLD, and a chapbook, Less Shiny. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Ninth Letter, McSweeney's Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Black Clock, Indiana Review, and others. Her fiction has been anthologized in New Stories from the South (2008) and Dzanc's Best of the Web (2010).

Reviews and Other Links
Jim Ruland @ The Believer
Laura van den Berg @ The Rumpus
Jonathan Messinger @ Time Out Chicago
interview by Daniel Gumbiner @ The Rumpus
Norene Smith @ Metro Times
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