Mary Miller. (2017). Always Happy Hour: Stories. Liveright.

Mary Miller. 2017. Always Happy Hour: Stories. Liveright.

Mary Miller, Always Happy Hour: Stories. Liveright, 2017.

Mary Miller. Always Happy Hour: Stories. Liveright, 2017.

OverDrive Product Record

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• role: Author
• name: Mary Miller

title

Always Happy Hour

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Miller, Mary
   • bioText: Mary Miller is the author of three previous books, including the story collection Always Happy Hour and the novel The Last Days of California. She is a former James A. Michener Fellow and John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
     
   • name: Mary Miller

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title

Always Happy Hour

fullDescription

"Sleek, sexy, slyly funny." —Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

A "bracingly strong" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) collection brimming with savage Southern charm, Always Happy Hour propels Mary Miller to new heights. Claustrophobic and lonesome, acerbic and magnetic, her characters seek understanding in the most unlikely places—a dilapidated foster home where love is a liability, a trailer park laden with a history of bad decisions, and the empty corners of a dream home bought after a bitter divorce. "Full of wit, bite, and the boundless intelligence of their author" (Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds), these stories evoke the particular gritty comfort found in bad habits as hope turns to dust, and they prove yet again Miller's essential role in American fiction.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: O, The Oprah Magazine
   • content: In Miller's new collection, a tipsy glow surrounds her Southern women as they trawl for cocktails, honk-tonk music, and men while nursing an inner ache they can't booze away. In lucid, vivid prose, Miller renders them alive to lust and, however improbably, to love.
2. • premium: False
   • source: Hilary Moss;New York Times Book Review
   • content: Enjoyable...a meditation on the stories a person tells herself.
3. • premium: False
   • source: Joyce Carol Oates;New York Review of Books
   • content: Deftly crafted.
4. • premium: False
   • source: Boris Kachka;Vulture
   • content: Somewhere between the old trope of the fallen woman and the unctuousness of the likable heroine, the young narrators of Miller's searching stories inhabit the middle space known as reality. . . . Anyone who's faltered on the way to success and contentment might find solace in the do-gooder in "Big Bad Love," or the boozy, boyfriend-enabled composition teacher in the title story.
5. • premium: False
   • source: Amelia Gray, author of Gutshot: Stories
   • content: Each of these stories has its own pulse. For anyone who's ever looked for love in all the wrong places, this shoebox full of beating hearts is for you.
6. • premium: False
   • source: Martha Sheridan;Dallas Morning News
   • content: Taken as a whole, this harrowing yet ultimately enjoyable collection is less about the conventions of storytelling—exposition, climax, denouement—and more of a meditation on the stories a person tells herself.
7. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
   • content: Readers will find themselves riveted...The 16 stories in this collection...feel both homey and exotic, limning lives at once familiar and distinctly their own. Like a two-for-one drink special or a boxful of beer, this bracingly strong collection may prove intoxicating.
8. • premium: False
   • source: Cosmopolitan magazine
   • content: Some of the women in this collection of short stories are spiraling; some are simply stuck. But they all have one thing in common: relationships in varying degrees of WTF? We can relate.
9. • premium: False
   • source: Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds
   • content: The stories in Mary Miller's Always Happy Hour are full of wit, bite, and the boundless intelligence of their author. This book is further evidence for what I felt after reading her brilliant debut novel, The Last Days of California, that Mary Miller is an astonishingly gifted writer. Her next one can't come soon enough.
10. • premium: False
    • source: Booklist (Starred Review)
    • content: The proximity to [Miller's] characters that her crystalline, unfiltered prose allows...will draw readers in immediately, and entirely.
11. • premium: False
    • source: Helen Ellis, author of American Housewife
    • content: Reading Always Happy Hour is like drinking an Old Fashioned. It's strong with a sweet burn, and after each taste you immediately want more. Reminiscent of Pam Houston's Cowboys Are My Weakness, Mary Miller writes well about sex, drugs and white bikinis.
12. • premium: False
    • source: Daniel Handler, author of We Are Pirates and Why We Broke Up
    • content: I fell into this book like it was a night of drinking. I sipped, I laughed, I had some more, I got lonely, I danced a little, I downed the rest, I wanted to cry, I stayed up late closing it out and I'm a wreck and I regret nothing.
13. • premium: False
    • source: Willy Vlautin, author of The Free
    • content: Stories of self-defeat and loneliness, of bad decisions or maybe worse, the inability to make decisions. Stories of treading water—where you know you should move towards shore but instead you let yourself drift farther out. Big World introduced us to the power of Mary Miller's short stories, and Always Happy Hour solidifies her as a major voice in Southern Literature.
14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from September 5, 2016
      In Miller’s stellar new collection of stories, a series of women who are struggling
      to figure out their lives must learn to cope with unsatisfying relationships and complicated friendships. All of the stories
      feature intimate, first-person
      narration from a woman who is in some form of trouble. In the title story, a college composition teacher has trouble maintaining her relationship with her boyfriend, mainly because they both drink heavily and he has a young son. In another story, “First Class,” a young woman tags along on expensive trips with her wealthy, bored friend even though neither of them especially want to be together. “Big Bad Love” concerns a narrator who works at a shelter for abused children. She cares about the neglected kids and dotes on one of them in particular, hoping the child will remember that someone loved her once. The women in these stories worry about their weight, how they look in bikinis, if they will ever have children, and whether they are living the life they should be. Miller’s collection feels so true because it never glosses over the desperate or unflattering portrayals of its narrators, but neither does it exploit their faults. These stories acutely explore boyfriends, exes, poor choices, and the sad fallout of so many doomed relationships.

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from October 1, 2016
      A sense of detachment permeates the lives of the women in this short story collection, yet readers will find themselves riveted.They drink too much, keep company with the wrong men (or perhaps the men are right and they are wrong), and moon around their lives like bored teens with nothing to do but find trouble on a sultry summer day. Some have money, others are seriously strapped for cash. Most are educated, all are smarteven if they dont make smart choices. The women who slouch around the centers of Millers (The Last Days of California, 2014, etc.) short storiesdrinking dive-bar beer or mixed drinks made strong, ordering in pizza or getting fast food from the drive-thru lane, binge-watching TV, and looking for love in all the wrong placesare all about squandered potential, loneliness, and listlessness, distance where closeness should be and vice versa. They may be frustratingly disconnected, indifferent to the men who love them, attracted to those who maybe dont. Their relationships with boyfriends, husbands, and exes, parents, siblings, friends, and neighbors are complicated, yet many seem stuck. What's holding them in place? Laziness? Fear? I guess my main problem with her is that she doesnt seem to be afraid of anything, the protagonist of one story, The House on Main Street, a divorced Southern grad student, says of her roommate, Melinda, a New Yorker who eats different foods (fresh meats she buys at the farmers market), writes different poetry (about apples and trees and never become more than apples and trees), and beds a different sort of man (Baptist and clean-cut and gets along well with everyone) than she. When Melinda is out, Millers protagonist sneaks into her bedroom to look at her stuff, marveling at how distinct the trappings of her roommate's life are from her own, never touching a thing. I just stand in her space feeling like an intruder, she says. The reader may respond the same way to the 16 stories in this collection, which feel both homey and exotic, limning lives at once familiar and distinctly their own. Like a two-for-one drink special or a boxful of beer, this bracingly strong collection may prove intoxicating.

      COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      August 1, 2016
      Miller, who caught the attention of dedicated readers with her first novel, "The Last Days of California", returns with a second story collection (after "Big World") featuring marginalized women struggling with the consequences of bad decisions or bad luck.

      Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

221

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"Sleek, sexy, slyly funny." —Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

A "bracingly strong" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) collection brimming with savage Southern charm, Always Happy Hour propels Mary Miller to new heights. Claustrophobic and lonesome, acerbic and magnetic, her characters seek understanding in the most unlikely places—a dilapidated foster home where love is a liability, a trailer park laden with a history of bad decisions, and the empty corners of a dream home bought after a bitter divorce. "Full of wit, bite, and the boundless intelligence of their author" (Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds), these stories evoke the particular gritty comfort found in bad habits as hope turns to dust, and they prove yet again Miller's essential role in American fiction.

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