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Personal Velocity
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The book

The vibrantly fresh and lustrous stories in Miller’s collection explore the multifaceted lives of women in seven arresting portraits. Modern and diverse, these women of different classes and ages struggle with sexuality, fate, motherhood, infidelity, desperation, and an overriding will to survive. We meet Greta, a cookbook editor who is chosen by Tavi, the hottest writer of his generation, to edit his new book. The book becomes a best-seller and Greta is propelled out of her marriage by her own ambition and success. Other characters include Paula, a pregnant twenty-one-year-old, who is on the run from the horror of a man who was hit by a car and died while walking her home from a nightclub; Delia, an abused working-class wife who goes into hiding with her children; and Louisa, a painter who moves rapidly from one lover to the next, acting out a self-perpetuating drama over which she has no control. Edgy, fearless, and beautifully spare, Personal Velocity is a superb collection from one of the best writers in contemporary fiction.

The Reviews

She is good with words: economical, deft with detail ... Miller writes with a welcome sensitivity ... compelling.
Independent

Whether Miller is writing about sophisticated New Yorkers or (in Delia) a wife who, with her three bewidlered children flees from a violent husband, her stories conjure up lives and worlds that linger in the memory.
Sunday Times

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Publication details

Published: 02 Jul 2009
Paperback
224 pages
Price:  £7.99
ISBN: 9781847673466

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Rebecca Miller

Rebecca Miller : BA from Yale, majoring in painting. Though she had written short stories since adolescence, Miller left Yale planning on being a painter, showed at Castelli Galleri and Victoria Munroe Gallery in New York, then began making short films.At first these films were extensions of her paintings; gradually they became more and more narrative. In order to fund this habit and to learn about film directing Miller began to work as an actress, and was lucky enough to work with directors Peter Brook, Alan Pacula, Carol Ballard, Maul Mazurski,and Mike Nicols in theater and film over a period of five years, which she considers a directors apprenticeship. Writingscreen plays and stories throughout this period, she wrote and directed her first feature film "Angela" in 1995. "Angela" won the IFP Gotham Prize as well as the Filmmakers Trophy in Sundance. Wishing to continue telling stories somehow and frustrated at not being able to raise money for her films, now the mother of a young child, she turned to writing short stories, publishing "Personal Velocity" in 2001, and subsequently making a film based on three of those stories ("Personal Velocity") which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance as well as the Cassavettes Prize at the Independent Spirit Awards.

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