Jonathan Miles

Jonathan Miles left home at seventeen, intent on a life in music, but when he landed in Oxford, Mississippi, he traded in the blues for writing. Having learned the art of fiction and of living from Barry Hannah and the late Larry Brown, he has worked as a blues researcher, bartender, gardener, and journalist, covering everything from the death of Faulkner’s bootlegger to the theory and practice of bar fights to the Dakar Rally in Africa. Jonathan’s debut novel, Dear American Airlines, involves Bennie Ford, a fifty-three-year-old failed poet turned translator, who 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 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 tale of a life misspent, talent wasted, opportunities botched, and happiness lost. A man both sinned against and sinning, Bennie pens his letter in a voice that is a marvel of lacerating wit directed at himself and at others, heart-on-sleeve emotion, and wide-ranging erudition, underlined by a consistent ground note of regret for the actions of a lifetime—and all of it is propelled by the fading hope that if he could just make it to the wedding, he might have a chance to do something right. Now the cocktails columnist for the New York Times and books columnist for Men’s Journal, Jonathan’s work has appeared, among other places, in GQ, the Oxford American, the New York Observer, and the New York Times Book Review.