Want Not by Jonathan Miles

Want Not by Jonathan Miles

A New York Times Notable Book, Want Not offers funny and occasionally devastating "portraits of humanity...as beautifully mundane and unique as a fingerprint." (Entertainment Weekly)

"Wonderful...the work of a fluid, confident and profoundly talented writer." --Dave Eggers

A highly inventive and corrosively funny story of our times, Want Not exposes three different worlds in various states of disrepair--a young freegan couple living off the grid in New York City; a once-prominent linguist, sacked at midlife by the dissolution of his marriage and his father's losing battle with Alzheimer's; and a self-made debt-collecting magnate, whose brute talent for squeezing money out of unlikely places has yielded him a royal existence, trophy wife included. Want and desire propel these characters forward toward something, anything, more, until their worlds collide, briefly, randomly, yet irrevocably, in a shattering ending that will haunt readers long after the last page is turned.

Dear American Airlines, Want Not, and Anatomy of a Miracle are all written by Jonathan Miles. He is a contributing editor to magazines like Details, Garden & Gun, Men's Magazine, and Field & Stream, and is a former New York Times columnist. Best American Sports Writing and Best American Crime Writing have both published anthologies of his work. He used to live in Oxford, Mississippi, but now resides in rural New Jersey beside the Delaware River.