Want Not - Paperback

by Jonathan Miles (Author)

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.

Back Jacket

A New York Times Notable Book
A wonderful book, and there s no one I would not urge to read it . . . This is the work of a fluid, confident and profoundly talented writer who gets more fluid, more confident and seemingly more talented even within the book itself. Dave Eggers, New York Times Book Review
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.
Shrewd, funny, and sometimes devastating . . . What Want Not does best, though, isn t plotting but portraits of humanity: the small epiphanies and private hurts of every person whose life, like the detritus they produce, is as beautifully mundane and unique as a fingerprint. Entertainment Weekly
An impassioned work of fiction. Dallas Morning News
[author photo] Jonathan Miles is a former columnist for the New York Times and a contributing editor to magazines as diverse as Field & Stream and Details. He writes regularly for the New York Times Book Review and Literary Review (UK). A former longtime resident of Oxford, Mississippi, he currently lives with his family in rural New Jersey.

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Author Biography

JONATHAN MILES's first novel, Dear American Airlines, was named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal. He writes regularly for the New York Times Book Review.