Rebecca Miller returns to short fiction for the first time since her collection of stories, Personal Velocity, with the arresting, darkly prescient Total.From Dublin to Martha's Vineyard, from the anxious comforts of motherhood to a technologically infected near future that mirrors today with dark prescience, each of the seven stories in Total is a world of its own, painted with vivid strokes, whose people and questions stay with the reader long after the story has ended. Joad, one of the first characters we meet, finds onionskin pages crammed in a locked desk drawer while refurbishing a Hudson Valley farmhouse; the terrifying words on the fragile paper haunt Joad and her husband, the woman who wrote them looming over the couple like a malevolent spirit. Her words embody the power of the act of creation and the insidious, untamable force of language once it has left one's pen. Rebecca Miller, the author of The Private Lives of Pippa...

The first Picador edition of Rebecca Miller's debut book "remind[s] us that good material is everywhere" (The Washington Post).The vibrantly fresh and lustrous stories in Miller's collection explore the multifaceted lives of women in seven arresting portraits. Modern and diverse, these women of different classes and ages struggle with sexuality, fate, motherhood, infidelity, desperation, and an overriding will to survive.We meet Greta, a cookbook editor who is chosen by Tavi, the hottest writer of his generation, to edit his new book. The book becomes a best-seller and Greta is propelled out of her marriage by her own ambition and success. Other characters include Paula, a pregnant twenty-one-year-old, who is on the run from the horror of a man who was hit by a car and died while walking her home from a nightclub; Delia, an abused working-class wife who goes into hiding with her children; and Louisa, a painter who moves rapidly from one lover to the...

Jacob is a Jewish peddler living in eighteenth-century France; Leslie and Deirdre Senzatimore are a settled American couple; and Masha is an alluring young ultra-Orthodox Jew who is gravely ill. In Jacob' s Folly, these four individuals will find their fates intertwined and the courses of their lives irrevocably altered when Jacob is reincarnated as a house fly in contemporary Long Island. Through the unique lens of Jacob' s consciousness, Miller explores transformation in all its guises-- personal, spiritual and literal. As she considers the hold of the past on the present, the power of private hopes and dreams, and the collision of fate and free will, Miller' s world-- which is our own, transfigured by her startlingly clear gaze and by her sharp, surprising wit-- comes to vibrant life. Leslie' s desire to act as hero and rescuer, Jacob' s disastrous marriage to the childlike Hodle and his intense obsession with Masha-- Miller sketches her...

Pippa seems to have everything in life. But suddenly she finds her world beginning to unravel. Amid the buzzing lawnmowers and suburban coffee mornings, she starts to wonder how she came to be in this place. The answer is a story of wild youth, unexpected encounters, affairs and betrayals, and the dangerous security of marriage. It brilliantly reveals the challenges of modern life - and all the possibilities that it holds.