Jonathan Miles has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators. The most-rated is Anatomy of a Miracle.
Dear American Airlines
Summary
Bennie Ford, a 53-year-old failed poet turned translator, is traveling to his estranged daughter's wedding when his flight is canceled. Stuck with thousands of fuming passengers in the purgatory of O'Hare airport, he watches the clock tick and realizes that he will miss the ceremony. Frustrated, irate, and helpless, Bennie does the only thing he can: he starts to write a letter. But what begins as a hilariously excoriating demand for a refund soon becomes the cri de coeur of a life misspent, talent wasted. Ford pens his letter in a voice that is a marvel of lacerating wit, heart-on-sleeve emotion, and wide-ranging erudition, all propelled by the fading hope that if he can just make it to the wedding, he has a chance to do something right in his life.
©2008 Jonathan Miles (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Want Not
Summary
A compulsively listenable, deeply human novel that examines our most basic and unquenchable emotion: want. With his critically acclaimed first novel, Jonathan Miles was widely praised as a comic genius "after something bigger" (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times) whose fiction was "not just philosophically but emotionally rewarding" (Richard Russo, New York Times Book Review, front cover). Now, in his much-anticipated second novel, Want Not, Miles takes a giant leap forward with this highly inventive and corrosively funny story of our times, a three-pronged tale of human excess that sifts through the detritus of several disparate lives - lost loves, blown chances, countless words, and deeds misdirected or misunderstood - all conjoined in their come-hell-or-high-water search for fulfillment. As the novel opens on Thanksgiving Day, listeners are telescoped into three different worlds in various states of disrepair - a young freegan couple living off the grid in New York City; a once-prominent linguist, sacked at midlife by the dissolution of his marriage and his father’s losing battle with Alzheimer’s; and a self-made debt-collecting magnate, whose brute talent for squeezing money out of unlikely places has yielded him a royal existence, trophy wife included. Want and desire propel these characters forward toward something, anything, more, until their worlds collide, briefly, randomly, yet irrevocably, in a shattering ending that will haunt listeners long after the last lines. With a satirist’s eye and a romantic’s heart, Miles captures the morass and comedy of contemporary life in all its excess. Bold, unblinking, unforgettable in its irony and pathos, Want Not is a wicked, big-hearted literary novel that confirms the arrival of a major voice in American fiction.
©2013 Jonathan Miles (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Anatomy of a Miracle
Summary
A profound new novel about a paralyzed young man's unexplainable recovery - a stunning exploration of faith, science, mystery, and the meaning of life Rendered paraplegic after a traumatic event four years ago, Cameron Harris has been living his new existence alongside his sister, Tanya, in their battered Biloxi, Mississippi, neighborhood where only half the houses made it through Katrina. One stiflingly hot August afternoon, as Cameron sits waiting for Tanya during their daily run to the Biz-E-Bee convenience store, he suddenly and inexplicably rises up and out of his wheelchair. In the aftermath of this "miracle", Cameron finds himself a celebrity at the center of a contentious debate about what's taken place. And when scientists, journalists, and a Vatican investigator start digging, Cameron's deepest secrets - the key to his injury, to his identity, and, in some eyes, to the nature of his recovery - become increasingly endangered. Was Cameron's recovery a genuine miracle or a medical breakthrough? And, finding himself transformed into a symbol, how can he hope to retain his humanity? Brilliantly written as closely observed journalistic reportage and filtered through a wide lens that encompasses the vibrant characters affected by Cameron's story, Anatomy of a Miracle will be championed and celebrated as a powerful story of our time and the work of a true literary master.
©2018 Jonathan Miles (P)2018 Random House Audio