Book Summary and Reviews of Total by Rebecca Miller

Book Summary

Rebecca Miller returns to short fiction for the first time since her collection of stories, Personal Velocity, with the arresting, darkly prescient Total.

But to get back to my subject. Of the little moment when I went the wrong way, from promising young woman to flotsam, to extraneousness―like the strands that rub off a ribbon and that you cut away.

Each of the seven stories in Total is a full world, painted with vivid strokes, one whose people and questions stay with the reader long after the story has ended and the book has been closed. Joad, one of the first characters we meet, finds onionskin pages crammed in a locked desk drawer while refurbishing a Hudson Valley farmhouse with her husband; the terrifying words on the fragile paper haunt Joad and their home, the woman who wrote them looming over them like a malevolent spirit. Innate in her words is the power of the act of creation and the ability of language to link people across time.

Rebecca Miller, the author of The Private Lives of Pippa Lee and Jacob's Folly, returns to short fiction for the first time since her beloved collection of stories, Personal Velocity. The author and award-winning filmmaker has "the soaring eye of the epicist and the sly instinct of the satirist" (The New Yorker), and her talents are on full display in Total. From Dublin to Martha's Vineyard, from the comforting mundanities of motherhood to a technologically infected near future that mirrors our present with dark prescience, each voice and life captured in this collection is utterly unforgettable.