River Bend Chronicle

From a striking talent with keen powers of observation comes this evocation of the eccentric Miller family's tangled connections between themselves, an unlikely cast of locals, and a seldom-documented urban Iowa, one not of cows and cornstalks but of concrete and rust, full of longstanding institutions buckling under economic pressures and peopled by citizens adrift in an America that began to vanish in the 1960s and '70s. Miller has engulfed the reader in a dysfunctional family searching for what it means to be a family and a city grasping for identity in the wake of strip malls and pop cultural trinkets. From this expansive debut interspersed with Bob Campagna's vintage photographs of urban Iowa in the '70s readers will emerge rooted to the terra firma of our national literature and reminded of the dreams we inherit as our own, long after we've moved away.

Ben Miller has published in AGNI, Ecotone, the Kenyon Review, the Antioch Review, Raritan, Salmagundi, One Story, and other journals. His essays have been reprinted or noted six times in Best American Essays, and his awards include fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is married to the poet Anne Pierson Wiese.