Sue Miller

A brilliantly insightful novel, engrossing and haunting, about marriage, love, family, and heartache, from New York Times bestselling author Sue Miller. Graham and Annie have been married for nearly thirty years. A golden couple, their effortless devotion has long been the envy of their circle of friends and acquaintances. Graham is a bookseller, and a large, gregarious man with large appetites--a lover of life, curious, eager to please, and the convivial host of frequent, lively parties at his and Annie's comfortable house in Cambridge. Annie, more reserved and introspective, is a photographer. After a six-year lull, she is about to have her first gallery show and is worried that the best years of her career may be behind her. They have two children; Sarah, the adult child of Annie and Graham, lives in San Francisco, and Lucas, Graham's son with his first wife Frieda, works in New York. Though Frieda is an integral part of this far-flung, loving family, Annie is confident in the knowledge that she is Graham's last and greatest love. When Graham suddenly dies, Annie is lost without this man whose enormous presence seemed to dominate their lives together. What is the point of going on, she wonders, without him? Soon after Graham's death, as she is trying to pick up the pieces of her life, Annie makes a shocking discovery. Shortly before his death, Graham had been unfaithful, involved in an impulsive, brief affair he was trying to end. Confronted by his infidelity, she spirals into darkness wondering if she truly knew the man who loved her. A tender, timeless novel that probes the heart of every committed relationship--how well do we know, can we ever know, the people we love--Monogamy is a mesmerizing portrait of a family and the secrets they keep from one another. As Sue Miller contemplates the imponderable, she reflects on the transformative power of memory, and the triumph of love over death itself. Beautiful, wise, and moving, Monogamy confirms her place as one of the most distinguished and extraordinary writers at work today.

Monogamy

While I Was Gone

A series of summer house fires exposes deep social faults in the hometown of Frankie Rowley, who makes unsettling discoveries about her aging parents while engaging in a passionate affair with a local journalist. By the best-selling author of While I Was Gone.

The Arsonist

Two unconventional women--Meri Fowler, pregnant, newly married, and discovering the gap between reality and expectation, and Delia Naughton, wife of a notoriously unfaithful liberal senator--confront the costs and challenges of love.

The Senator's Wife

Spanning forty years Family Pictures follows the conflict between husband and wife, over a beautiful autistic child. Randall is both angel and demon. His father, David, a coolly rational psychiatrist, wants him placed in an institution; his mother, Lainey, insists on keeping him at home. Yet it is not just David and Lainey who are struggling to come to terms with a difficult and unpredictable child; there are five other children in the family, each of them coping with the dramas and rifts surrounding them, each of them affected by Randall.

Family Pictures

Recently divorced, Anna Dunlap has two passionate attachments: her daughter, four-year-old Molly, and her lover, Leo, the man who makes her feel beautiful -- and sexual -- for the first time. Swept away by happiness and passion, Anna feels she has everything she's ever wanted. Then come the shocking charges that would threaten her new love, her new "family" ... that force her to prove she is a good mother.

A Novel

The Good Mother

With insight and intelligence, Sue Miller explores the intricates of family and love Lottie Gardner, her brother, Cameron, and their childhood friend Elizabeth have all come together in their hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts, after years of separation. Lottie is barraged with memories of the past as she packs up her mother's house and witnesses the rekindling of an old romance between Cameron and Elizabeth. When a senseless tragedy intrudes upon them, Lottie is forced to examine the consequences of what she has done for love.

For Love

Sue Miller's stunning novel captures a world of lost possibilities, exploring the hopes and regrets that lie buried in the hearts of women

The World Below

Sue Miller's stories from a chapter in the moral history of our time Like Sue Miller's bestselling novels, this collection of short stories explores the treacherously shifting ground of erotic and family relationships with deftness and depth. The title story is about a young man who takes up successively with three daughters of the most fashionable family in town. In other stories, whose characters range from a young girl in the first blush of sexual curiosity to a stricken dowager whose seizures release a brutal and sometimes obscene candor, Sue Miller presents a compelling gallery of contemporary men and women with hungry hearts and dismayed consciences.

Inventing the Abbotts

Katrina Kenison

A compilation of twenty American short stories originally published in magazines and periodicals issued between January 2001 and January 2002, selected for inclusion by guest editor Sue Miller.

Selected from U.S. and Canadian Magazines

The Best American Short Stories, 2002

For Eva, the divorced and happily remarried mother of three children, and her adolescent middle child, Daisy, the death of Eva's second husband John in a car accident turns their lives upside down, a tragedy that draws Daisy into a confusing, chaotic, and unstable world as she embarks on a harrowing sexual odyssey with a much older man. Reader's Guide included. Reprint. 150,000 first printing.

Lost in the Forest

Na het zien van een toneelstuk gebaseerd op de gebeurtenissen van 9/11 denken enkele mensen terug aan hun eigen (verloren) liefdesrelaties en proberen daarover samen te praten.

De laatste voorstelling

An insightful story examines how Wilhelmina "Billy" Gertz comes to write a play about the terrorist bombing of a train, how the work is then created anew by the actors and the director and how the performance itself touches and changes the other characters' lives. By the best-selling author of The Senator's Wife.

The Lake Shore Limited

The moving story of a mother and son that touches the deepest concerns about love, art, family, and life Lily Maynard is proud, chilly, difficult, and has become a famous writer at age seventy-two. Now, stricken with Parkinson's disease and staying with her architect son Alan, Lily must cope with her fading powers as well as with disturbing memories of the events that estranged her from her children and ended her marriage. For Alan, her visit raises old questions about his relationship with her, about the choices he has made in his own life, and about the nature of love, disappointment, and grief. Profound and moving, The Distinguished Guest reveals a family trying to understand the meaning of its life together, while confronting inevitable loss and the vision of an immeasurably altered future.

The Distinguished Guest

Natalie Danford

John Kulka

This year's volume, featuring 17 new stories selected by award-winning novelist John Casey, continues the tradition of identifying the best young writers on the cusp of their careers.

Best New American Voices 2007

Dall’autrice bestseller Sue Miller, un accattivante romanzo sulla vita di coppia in cui sono protagonisti la bugia, i segreti e il tradimento. Graham e Annie sono sposati da quasi trent’anni. Nella loro cerchia di amici e conoscenti, sono considerati una coppia d’oro. Graham è un libraio, un uomo molto socievole con grandi appetiti: curioso, desideroso di compiacere, amante della vita e del cibo, conviviale organizzatore di feste vivaci. Annie, più riservata e introspettiva, è una fotografa. Sta per inaugurare la sua prima mostra in galleria dopo una lunga pausa ed è preoccupata che i migliori anni della sua carriera possano essere ormai passati. Hanno due figli adulti: Sarah, che vive a San Francisco, e Lucas, il figlio che Graham ha avuto dalla sua prima moglie Frieda. Sebbene Frieda, discreta e amorevole, sia una presenza costante nella loro vita, Annie è consapevole di essere il più grande amore del marito. Quando Graham muore improvvisamente, Annie è perduta. Che senso ha andare avanti, si chiede, senza di lui? Poi, mentre è ancora in lutto, scopre un segreto rovinoso, che la farà precipitare nell’oscurità e la costringerà a chiedersi se ha mai conosciuto veramente l’uomo che ha amato: Graham la tradiva, e con una donna che lei conosce. Tra i migliori libri dell’anno per molte testate statunitensi, Monogamia, seducente romanzo avvolto da un velo di mistero, è un’intelligente fotografia delle relazioni amorose di lunga data e dei segreti che spesso vi si nascondono. «Un libro ricco, profondo. Alla fin fine, è la storia di un matrimonio: un romanzo alla vecchia maniera, che esplode lentamente e fa sognare i lettori». Richard Russo, «The New York Times Book Review» «Il talento di Sue Miller trasforma una trama familiare in una storia originale che riflette la complessità della vita reale nelle relazioni di lunga data. Monogamia dimostra che Miller rimane una delle migliori cartografe del territorio del matrimonio». «The Washington Post» «Un romanzo sensuale e acuto. Con umorismo e umanità, Miller evita il luogo comune della storia sulla moglie tradita e crea invece un racconto rivelatore delle complessità – e delle assurdità – dell’amore, dell’infedeltà e del dolore». «O, The Oprah Magazine» «Un romanzo basato su una prosa vibrante, personaggi rappresentati vividamente e la resilienza dell’amore eterno. Un ritorno spettacolare e potente». «Publishers Weekly»

Monogamia

In the fall of 1988, Sue Miller found herself caring for her father as he slipped into the grasp of Alzheimer's disease. She was, she claims, perhaps the least constitutionally suited of all her siblings to be in the role in which she suddenly found herself, and in The Story of My Father she grapples with the haunting memories of those final months and the larger narrative of her father's life. With compassion, self-scrutiny, and an urgency born of her own yearning to rescue her father's memory from the disorder and oblivion that marked his dying and death, Sue Miller takes us on an intensely personal journey that becomes, by virtue of her enormous gifts of observation, perception, and literary precision, a universal story of fathers and daughters. James Nichols was a fourth-generation minister, a retired professor from Princeton Theological Seminary. Sue Miller brings her father brilliantly to life in these pages-his religious faith, his endless patience with his children, his gaiety and willingness to delight in the ridiculous, his singular gifts as a listener, and the rituals of church life that stayed with him through his final days. She recalls the bitter irony of watching him, a church historian, wrestle with a disease that inexorably lays waste to notions of time, history, and meaning. She recounts her struggle with doctors, her deep ambivalence about many of her own choices, and the difficulty of finding, continually, the humane and moral response to a disease whose special cruelty it is to dissolve particularities and to diminish, in so many ways, the humanity of those it strikes. She reflects, unforgettably, on the variable nature of memory, the paradox of trying to weave a truthful narrative from the threads of a dissolving life. And she offers stunning insight into her own life as both a daughter and a writer, two roles that swell together here in a poignant meditation on the consolations of storytelling. With the care, restraint, and consummate skill that define her beloved and best-selling fiction, Sue Miller now gives us a rigorous, compassionate inventory of two lives, in a memoir destined to offer comfort to all sons and daughters struggling-as we all eventually must-to make peace with their fathers and with themselves.

A Memoir

The Story of My Father

Richard Egües and José Fajardo are universally regarded as the leading exponents of charanga flute playing, an improvisatory style that crystallized in 1950s Cuba with the rise of the mambo and the chachachá. Despite the commercial success of their recordings with Orquesta Aragón and Fajardo y sus Estrellas and their influence not only on Cuban flute players but also on other Latin dance musicians, no in-depth analytical study of their flute solos exists. In Cuban Flute Style: Interpretation and Improvisation, Sue Miller—music historian, charanga flute player, and former student of Richard Egües—examines the early-twentieth-century decorative style of flute playing in the Cuban danzón and its links with the later soloistic style of the 1950s as exemplified by Fajardo and Egües. Transcriptions and analyses of recorded performances demonstrate the characteristic elements of the style as well as the styles of individual players. A combination of musicological analysis and ethnomusicological fieldwork reveals the polyrhythmic and melodic aspects of the Cuban flute style, with commentary from flutists Richard Egües, Joaquín Oliveros, Polo Tamayo, Eddy Zervigón, and other renowned players. Miller also covers techniques for flutists seeking to learn the style—including altissimo fingerings for the Boehm flute and fingerings for the five-key charanga flute—as well as guidance on articulation, phrasing, repertoire, practicing improvisation, and working with recordings. Cuban Flute Style will appeal to those working in the fields of Cuban music, improvisation, music analysis, ethnomusicology, performance and performance practice, popular music, and cultural theory.

Interpretation and Improvisation

Cuban Flute Style

Laura Sigoloff

A story about a friendship and deep love with someone who has never spoken to you.

In the Land of Love

Jo Becker has moved on with her life after the brutal murder of a friend. Now married with a grown family, she rekindles a relationship when an old housemate moves into the neighborhood. Jo is taken back to the past and her future is threatened.

Sue Miller

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