Mary Miller has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 7 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Biloxi.
Biloxi
Summary
Mary Miller seizes the mantle of Southern literature with this wry tale of middle age and the unexpected turns a life can take. Like her predecessors Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver, Mary Miller brings an essential voice to her generation. Building on her critically acclaimed novel The Last Days of California and her biting collection Always Happy Hour, Miller slyly transports listeners to her unapologetic corner of the South - this time, Biloxi, Mississippi, home to 63-year-old Louis McDonald, Jr. His wife of 37 years left him, his father has passed - and he has impulsively retired from his job in anticipation of an inheritance check that may not come. In the meantime, he watches reality television, sips beer, and avoids his ex-wife and daughter. One day, he stops at a house advertising free dogs and meets overweight mixed-breed Layla. Unexpectedly, Louis takes her, and, newly invigorated, begins investigating local dog parks and buying extra bologna. Mining the absurdities of life with her signature "droll minimalist's-eye view of America" (Joyce Carol Oates), Biloxi affirms Miller's place in contemporary literature.
©2019 Mary Miller (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
The Last Days of California
Summary
A teenage girl and her unraveling family travel cross-country in preparation for the Rapture in this radiant, highly anticipated debut. With The Last Days of California, Mary Miller bursts into the literary world, taking up the mantle of Southern fiction and rendering it her own with wry vulnerability and contemporary urgency. Miller’s revelatory protagonist, Jess, is fourteen years old and waiting for the world to end. Her evangelical father has packed up the family and left their Montgomery home to drive west to California, hoping to save as many souls as possible before the Second Coming. With her long-suffering mother and rebellious (and secretly pregnant) sister, Jess hands out tracts to nonbelievers at every rest stop, waffle house, and gas station along the way. As Jess’ belief frays, her teenage myopia evolves into awareness about her fracturing family. Using deadpan humor and savage charm belying deep empathy for her characters, Miller’s debut captures the angst, sexual rivalry, and escalating self-doubt of teenage life in America while announcing Miller as a fierce new voice.
©2014 Mary Miller (P)2013 Audible Inc.
Big World
Summary
A short story collection full of powerful prose and remarkably genuine characters from the author of The Last Days of California. 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 spilled beer and cigarette smoke.
©2009 Mary Miller (P)2014 Blackstone Audio
Changing Direction
Summary
Too many people fail to take control of their lives, allowing themselves to fall victim and accept whatever happens. When you choose to dream and defy the naysayers all around you can change direction and accomplish nearly anything you set out to achieve. In Changing Direction, Mary Miller lays out 10 choices anyone can make to impact his or her dreams. By concentrating on improving the future, you become a new, happier and more energized person. Miller describes how she first seized control of her life in 1987 as a then-30-year-old twice-divorced single mother of three. She explains how she later found the fortitude and support to buck conventional wisdom and change the direction of the family business she led with her third husband, Tony. To address their biggest obstacle, turnover, they began encouraging people to achieve their dreams and developed the Dream Manager program, a world-renowned initiative helping employees identify dreams, set goals and work to reach a better future. Miller explains that there are few things worse than having no control. You may feel lost. You may feel desperate. You may feel despair, but it does not have to be this way. Changing Direction weaves Miller s amazing personal story of triumph and transformation with 10 practical choices you can make today in order to move from victim to victor. To get started, all you have to do is dream.
©2016 Mary Miller (P)2017 Mary Miller