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Jonathan Miles

JONATHAN MILES is the author of the novels Dear American Airlines and Want Not, both New York Times Notable books, and the novel Anatomy of a Miracle: The True* Story of a Paralyzed Veteran, a Mississippi Convenience Store, a Vatican Investigation, and the Spectacular Perils of Grace, which was a featured selection for the American Library Association’s Book Club Central and is currently in development as a feature film. Dear American Airlines was named a Best Book of 2008 by the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Amazon.com, and others. It was also a finalist for the QPB New Voices Award, the Borders Original Voices Award, and the Great Lakes Book Award, and has been translated into six languages. Want Not was named a best or favorite book of 2013 by Kirkus Reviews, the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, bookish.com, bookriot.com, and litReactor.com, and was a finalist for the 2014 Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Award in Fiction. He is a former columnist for the New York Times and has been a contributing editor to a wide range of national magazines including Garden & Gun, where he has served as Books columnist since 2012. His journalism has been included numerous times in the annual Best American Crime Writing and Best American Sports writing anthologies, most notably his account of competing in the 2005 Dakar Rally, a 5,500-mile race through north Africa. In 2024 he toured as a multi-instrumentalist in the band of the Grammy-winning artist Jon Batiste. He currently serves as Writer-in-Residence at the Solebury School in New Hope, Pennsylvania.

5 Books Written

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Anatomy of a Miracle

by Jonathan Miles

Rating: 3.6 ⭐

• 2 recommendations ❤️

A profound new novel about a paralyzed young man's unexplainable recovery--a stunning exploration of faith, science, mystery, and the meaning of life Rendered paraplegic after a traumatic event four years ago, Cameron Harris has been living his new existence alongside his sister, Tanya, in their battered Biloxi, Mississippi neighborhood where only half the houses made it through Katrina. One stiflingly hot August afternoon, as Cameron sits waiting for Tanya during their daily run to the Biz-E-Bee convenience store, he suddenly and inexplicably rises up and out of his wheelchair.In the aftermath of this "miracle," Cameron finds himself a celebrity at the center of a contentious debate about what's taken place. And when scientists, journalists, and a Vatican investigator start digging, Cameron's deepest secrets--the key to his injury, to his identity, and, in some eyes, to the nature of his recovery--become increasingly endangered. Was Cameron's recovery a genuine miracle, or a medical breakthrough? And, finding himself transformed into a symbol, how can he hope to retain his humanity?Brilliantly written as closely observed journalistic reportage and filtered through a wide lens that encompasses the vibrant characters affected by Cameron's story, Anatomy of a Miracle will be read, championed, and celebrated as a powerful story of our time, and the work of a true literary master.

Year: 2019Pages:

Dear American Airlines

by Jonathan Miles

Rating: 3.1 ⭐

Bennie Ford, a fifty-three-year-old failed poet turned translator, is traveling to his estranged daughter’s wedding when his flight is canceled. Stuck with thousands of fuming passengers in the purgatory of O’Hare International Airport, he watches the clock tick and realizes that he will miss the ceremony. Frustrated, irate, and helpless, Bennie does the only thing he can: he starts to write a letter. But what begins as a hilariously excoriating demand for a refund soon becomes a lament for a life gone awry, for years misspent, talent wasted, and happiness lost. Bennie's writing is infused with a sense of remorse for the actions of a lifetime - and made all the more urgent by the fading hope that if he can just make it to the wedding, he might have a chance to do something right.A margarita blend of outrage, humor, vulnerability, intelligence, and regret, "Dear American Airlines" gives new meaning to the term “airport novel” and announces the emergence of major new talent in American fiction.

Year: 2008Pages:

Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

Rating: 3.7 ⭐

A compulsively readable, deeply human novel that examines our most basic and unquenchable emotion: want. With his critically acclaimed first novel Dear American Airlines, Jonathan Miles was widely praised as a comic genius “after something bigger” (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times) whose fiction was “not just philosophically but emotionally rewarding” (Richard Russo, New York Times Book Review, front cover). Now, in his much anticipated second novel, Want Not, Miles takes a giant leap forward with this highly inventive and corrosively funny story of our times, a three-pronged tale of human excess that sifts through the detritus of several disparate lives—lost loves, blown chances, countless words and deeds misdirected or misunderstood—all conjoined in their come-hell-or-high-water search for fulfillment.As the novel opens on Thanksgiving Day, readers are telescoped into three different worlds in various states of disrepair—a young freegan couple living off the grid in New York City; a once-prominent linguist, sacked at midlife by the dissolution of his marriage and his father’s losing battle with Alzheimer’s; and a self-made debt-collecting magnate, whose brute talent for squeezing money out of unlikely places has yielded him a royal existence, trophy wife included.Want and desire propel these characters forward toward something, anything, more, until their worlds collide, briefly, randomly, yet irrevocably, in a shattering ending that will haunt readers long after the last page is turned.With a satirist’s eye and a romantic’s heart, Miles captures the morass and comedy of contemporary life in all its excess. Bold, unblinking, unforgettable in its irony and pathos, Want Not is a wicked, bighearted literary novel that confirms the arrival of a major voice in American fiction.

Year: 2013Pages:

Eradication: A Fable

by Jonathan Miles

Rating: 4.4 ⭐

From acclaimed author Jonathan Miles (“a writer so virtuosic that readers will feel themselves becoming better, more observant people from reading him"— LA Times ) comes a blackly comic literary gem in which a broken man confronts a broken world on an uninhabited Pacific island.Reeling from tragedy, a former jazz musician-turned-schoolteacher named Adi answers a job listing advertising a chance to save the world. The to spend five weeks alone on the tiny, isolated Pacific Island of Santa Flora righting an ecological balance that’s gone severely out of whack, with the aim of preserving countless bird and plant species from certain extinction. What follows, however, is anything but balanced. The threats to the once-Edenic island, Adi soon learns, aren’t exactly what his employers said they were—and, complicating things further, he discovers he’s not alone on the island. Fearful for his own life, and for the fate of the island's, Adi spends his sun-drenched days rooting out the true threat to Santa Flora, and, by extension, to the world it occupies—and the desperate steps he must take to eradicate it.A desert-island meditation on the contours of love and grief and solitude as well as jolt to your emotional core, Eradication is an utterly unforgettable reading experience, a narrative tour de force, and the work of a truly singular imagination. With this fourth work of fiction, Jonathan Miles, “a fluid, confident, and profoundly talented writer” (Dave Eggers) has truly come into his own.

Year: 2026Pages:

Wild Chef

by Jonathan Miles

Rating: 4.1 ⭐

Year: 2014Pages: