John Miller (2) (1959–)

It falls down. It burns up. It goes Beatnik in the fifties and crazy in the sixties. It stays elegant throughout. Every city has its stories, but San Francisco seems to have more than most. From Jack Kerouac on working on the railroad to Anne Lamott on getting kicked out of the cafe scene, and from Jack London on the 1906 earthquake to Tom Wolfe on the acid tests of the 1960s, San Francisco Stories collects the most outstanding writings about the city from some of the most distinguished show more authors of the last 150 years. show less

I really enjoyed this collection, for the most part, but as someone who edited a few anthologies during my time as an editor at Penguin, I had a few quibbles. Overall, I was happy with the range represented here--particularly happy to see an excerpt from Louis Armstrong's fantastic autobiography here, as well as Ellen Gilchrist, who is a revelation. I also loved the historical documents included as well.

On the other hand, there were some pretty embarrassing copyediting errors that I show more guarantee were not in the original books (including one in the Confederacy of Dunces excerpt and the Robert Penn Warren excerpt). The other aspect I found a bit off-putting was the pervasiveness of the n-word in the selections here. Example: the excerpt from Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men begins with, in my opinion, a rather purple description of the highway leading into Mason City. Embedded in that description is some rather embarrassing and, frankly, poorly written descriptions of black sharecroppers, including and complete with an attempt at dialect. Yes, this was the late forties. I'm not going to rail against RPW for writing this way. But I do think that the editor here, John Miller, could have used a bit of discretion. Including this excerpt from RPW was marginal--Mason City is not New Orleans, and the entire excerpt takes place there. But also, it's not really underscoring anything, which is what I'd imagine including this description might do, and as it does in other pieces in the book, especially Gilchrist's devastating "Rich." And having never read Anne Rice, I am glad to know that I should continue to avoid her work. Argh. Oh, and Carl Sandburg's description of Lincoln's trip down the Mississippi was a kick in the pants to read his biography of Lincoln. show less

This is a collection of short stories, book excerpts, essays and poetry about the islands off Massachusetts. Included are Melville, Poe, Plath, Mailer, Paul Theroux, Vonnegut... My favorites are a short story by John Cheever called "The Chaste Clarissa" about a summer regular on the cape who spends his vacation trying to seduce a taciturn young wife whose husband is away, and the essay "Provincetown Diary" by Louise Rafkin, who won a place in the town's writing residence program.
This seemed show more like the perfect book for an end-of-summer read. show less

This is a collection of fictional and nonfiction writings connected to Berlin. Some are about the city itself, some about its people, its history, its atmosphere. Like any collection, some of the selections are better than others. Overall, the book gives the reader a sense of the city that is entertaining and thought-provoking.