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Ben Miller selected as 2014–15 Radcliffe Institute Fellow River Bend Chronicle shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing WHQR interview with Sara Wood Book Notes and playlist on Largehearted Boy
“Funny and beautifully crafted ... Miller’s affecting chronicle reveals the often messy ways that families fall apart and the way that writing acts both as remembrance and redemption.”
“What Miller presents is a kind of forgiveness, brave, heroic, and largely “Miller’s memoir is gritty and well-told, an uncomfortable coming-of-age story that is as unique as it is universal.” —Wisconsin State Journal “Melvillian in its packed facts, fascinating characters, stylistic
virtuosity, and deep-diving ambition to understand destructive madness ... a work that should be the gold standard for literary memoirs in the
future.” “We book reviewers dig and dig through the
stacks of books. There are some very good ones. And now and then there’s
a book like Ben Miller’s memoir about growing up during the 1970’s in
the Mississippi River town of Davenport, Iowa. I felt like I had stumbled upon an old trunk up in the attic. When I opened it up I was delighted by the gleaming treasure inside.” “A magnificently told memoir in essays ... Miller’s prose is lyrical and often comic even when dealing with the harshest subjects.” David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy “A remarkable but challenging book ... Miller has laid bare a universe “A nothing-short-of-amazing memoir of his boyhood spent in urban Iowa in the 1970s ... Miller is an inspired wordsmith ... Although Davenport on a bend in the muddy Mississippi River is probably a city you never wanted to know, you will see it, feel it, hear it, smell it, and not be able to forget it.” “Ben Miller’s prose is incandescent, bittersweet, and hilarious. Few writers have given more compelling voice to their memories of a particular place. The Great American Midwest will never look—or feel—the same.” “Ben Miller’s writing has left a trail of clear and perfect images lasered permanently in my mind. His imagination is astounding in its breadth and detail, but it is the heart behind the words, the emotion he brings to the smallest moments, that makes me such an admirer of this writer and his work.” “Ben Miller seems not so much to write his sentences as dowse his way into them, following the subterranean logic of language and creating the amplitude of his completely unique America. His prose is, at once, fetchingly lyrical and deeply comic—comic in a way that is eyes-open to the tragic sense of life. Reading his essays, I feel disconcertingly—but also relievedly—human.” “Ben Miller’s greatest attempt at loving his family is in the words themselves ... When Miller writes about files [his father] kept out in the rain, he does so with wonder, with curiosity, with feeling. He returns to that image several times and each time it’s as if he’s looking at the image for the first time. Looking back on painful images can be cathartic. They remind us that we are alive, that our experiences and observations are unique to us. By returning to what is the worst, Miller has given us the best.” —Sally Cabau, Neworld Review “A wind around the mind is perhaps the best way I can describe Miller’s writing. What I love about his work (among other qualities) is the way it seems to harness and surf this wind, creating both the consciousness-on-the-page experience that often defines the best nonfiction, as well as a unique physicality and sense of place, or at least psychological architecture. You have to give yourself over to the writing’s own idiosyncrasies; but this effort is always rewarded with lines or images that give back ten-fold what they ask you to bring ... His writing is just a joy to read. I've been waiting for this book for years.”
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