Always Happy Hour weaves tales of young women who are deeply flawed, intensely real, and who struggle to get out of their own way. These women love to drink and have sex; they make bad decisions with men who love them too much or too little; they haunt gas stations, public pools, and dive bars, seeking understanding in the most unlikely of places; and, although each shoulders the weight of different baggage, they all suspect they deserve better. In this collection of acerbic and ruefully funny stories, Miller takes a microscope to love and intimacy, evoking the reticence of love among the misunderstood, the grit and comfort of bad habits that can’t be broken, and the beat-by-beat minutiae of ill-fated relationships.

A short story collection full of powerful prose and remarkably genuine characters from the author of The Last Days of California

The collection of stories, produced by Andi Arndt, is performed by the author along with a stunning cast of Nashville stars, including Janis Ian, Mary Gauthier, Telisha Williams, Amy Speace, and Louise Mosrie.

The characters in Mary Miller’s debut short story collection, Big World, are at once autonomous and lonesome, possessing both a longing to connect with those around them and a cynicism regarding their ability to do so, whether they’re holed up in a motel room in Pigeon Forge with an air-gun-shooting boyfriend, as in “Fast Trains,” or navigating the rooms of their house with their dad after their mother’s death as in “Leak.” Mary Miller’s writing is unapologetically honest and efficient, and the gut-wrenching directness of her prose is reminiscent of Mary Gaitskill and Courtney Eldridge, if Gaitskill’s and Eldridge’s stories were set in the South and reeked of spilled beer and cigarette smoke.

Mary Miller seizes the mantle of Southern literature with this wry tale of middle age and the unexpected turns a life can take.
Like her predecessors Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver, Mary Miller brings an essential voice to her generation. Building on her critically acclaimed novel The Last Days of California and her biting collection Always Happy Hour, Miller slyly transports listeners to her unapologetic corner of the South-this time, Biloxi, Mississippi, home to sixty-three-year-old Louis McDonald, Jr. His wife of thirty-seven years left him, his father has passed-and he has impulsively retired from his job in anticipation of an inheritance check that may not come. In the meantime, he watches reality television, sips beer, and avoids his ex-wife and daughter. One day, he stops at a house advertising free dogs and meets overweight mixed-breed Layla. Unexpectedly, Louis takes her, and, newly invigorated, begins investigating local dog parks and buying extra bologna. Mining the absurdities of life with her signature “droll minimalist’s-eye view of America” (Joyce Carol Oates), Biloxi affirms Miller’s place in contemporary literature.