It’s been a big month for Mary Miller. Even prior to today’s release of her debut novel, The Last Days of California, excerpts and starred reviews found their way into the pages of Elle and O!

I had no business in a haberdashery store that expensive as a seventeen-year-old high school student most recently employed as a dishwasher; even less so as a recently self-declared man, an until-three-weeks-ago woman, lurking timidly, covetously, in the racks of ties.  

I am at the back of the ConEx with a broom in my hand, smoking a cigarette. Every year it is the same. The light filters in through the opposite end where a padlock hangs from a steel latch on the

To be honest, there were other books that had as great an impact on me, but I don’t have access to those authors (Bret Easton Ellis – Lunar Park, Elizabeth Wurtzel – More, Now, Again, W. Somerset Maugham – Of Human Bondage)..

We crowd around the flame, we extend our naked hands, we feel the joints in our fingers warm and crack. The smoke stains our jackets and hats with its smell.

A lady doesn’t need makeup unless it’s the war paint she’s putting on to end me. 

Yesterday, Barry Graham favored us with his Top 10 Cities to Get Drunk In, numbers 5-1, and last week he gave us 10-6 and a series of guest-additions. Below are a second set of guest entries from

Last week, Barry Graham favored us with his Top 10 Cities to Get Drunk In, numbers 10-6, as well as a series of guest-additions. Below are are his top 5, and we will follow-up tomorrow for a second

Yesterday, Barry Graham favored us with his Top 10 Cities to Get Drunk In, numbers 10-6. He also included a few guest entries from some of his favorite drinker/writer/travelers, and those are

We all know what getting drunk means and we all know what cities are and the title is pretty self explanatory, so I'm gonna use my obligatory top ten introductory statement to break down my

I sat and bawled for half an hour after finishing Hill William in one swift read through this morning, beginning to end in an hour. 

“Go back to sleep,” I hissed at Perry. It was 2:00 in the morning and we were in our newly purchased condo in Mammoth, sleeping in twin beds in the only room that was habitable. The other two

I’ve gotten in the habit of writing these long email invitations and party reminders for parties I host at my place. Here’s from my 2nd Annual Holiday Festival party. I’ve got a Cherry Tomato

18. You will understand and properly use the term “brown out” in every day conversation.

"We’re sorry. We’re not sorry. It was that kind of year, our year in the dumpster, our year in the occult, our year of the amateur séance."

"As a term, postmodernism came into my vocabulary in 1988.  It had not yet moved from art and English and music into theology the way it has in recent years by then, but it was, of course, still extant in the visual codes of culture."

You’re in a car tunneling in the wake of its own headlights. Last you remember, you were in a bar, in Oxford, Mississippi, and you had walked there. As you come to, you realize the car is full, and

In an interview with Luna Park in 2009, I was quoted as saying this:

I really do believe in the whole write-what-you-know thing. One time I wrote a story from the point of view of an old sick

Here is one photo for each story in my story collection, Happy Rock. It is available now. 

All the stories in Happy Rock are set in Upper Michigan. Most in the towns of Gladstone or

on page 97, between sections that detail time Paul and Erin spend in Ohio with “Calvin” and “Maggie” (Jordan Castro and Mallory Whitten), I wrote: Manson Family, in large black letters.

FLYING SAUCER ATTACK: “Beach Red Lullaby” (b/w “Second Hour,” 7. single, Planet, 1995) 

Driving westbound on the Massachusetts Turnpike’s thirty-mile Berkshire run between Exits 3 and 2,

It started that stupid night you convinced me to walk with you over the bridge and along the river. I shouldn't have done that and I knew it—even before we left, I knew it—and I thought to

I can take just about anything now.

Like how I returned from Christmas vacation to an inch of melted snow and a gaping hole above where I pee. Lake Effect, my landlord said, simply, squinting

I fell in love with Lena Dunham from the first scene of the first episode of her hit TV show, Girls. I connected with her instantaneously, and knowing that she also wrote the script for the show

I. There’s a message from home—a place we call Pineapple for the two kinds of trees that hide it from the river. It’s a clipping from my father. No greeting, just a photo and a little