The Private Lives of Pippa Lee: A Novel

What part of our selves do we hide away in order to have a stable, prosperous life? 
Pippa Lee has just such a life in place at age fifty, when her older husband, a retired publisher, decides that they should move to a retirement community outside New York City. Pippa is suddenly deprived of the stimulation and distraction that had held everything in place. She begins losing track of her own mind; her foundations start to shudder, and gradually we learn the truth of the young life that led her finally to settle down in marriage--years of neglect and rebellion, wild transgressions and powerful defiance. 
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is the study of a brave, curious, multilayered woman--an acutely intelligent portrait of the many lives behind a single name.

Literature & Fiction

Miller, Rebecca

Humor & Satire

Picador

A luminous novel-funny and moving in equal measure-that shines with the author's unique talents
Jacob's Folly is a rollicking, ingenious, saucy book, brimful of sparkling, unexpected characters, that takes on desire, faith, love, acting-and reincarnation. In eighteenth-century Paris, Jacob Cerf is a Jew, a peddler of knives, saltcellars, and snuffboxes. Despite a disastrous teenage marriage, he is determined to raise himself up in life, by whatever means he can. More than two hundred years later, Jacob is amazed to find himself reincarnated as a fly in the Long Island suburbs of twenty-first-century America, his new life twisted in ways he could never have imagined. But even the tiniest of insects can influence the turning of the world, and thanks to his arrival, the lives of a reliable volunteer fireman and a young Orthodox Jewish woman nursing a secret ambition will never be the same. Through the unique lens of Jacob's consciousness, Rebecca Miller explores change in all its different guises-personal, spiritual, literal. The hold of the past on the present, the power of private hopes and dreams, the collision of fate and free will: Miller's world-which is our own, transfigured by her clear gaze and by her sharp, surprising wit-comes brilliantly to life in the pages of this profoundly original novel.

Jacob's Folly: A Novel

United States

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

At fifty, Pippa Lee seems just fine. The devoted wife of a brilliant publisher thirty years her senior, the proud mother of successful twins, and a lovely and adored friend and neighbor, she seems to glow with feminine serenity. But when her husband spontaneously decides they should cast off Gramercy Park for Marigold Village retirement home as a “preemptive strike against his decrepitude,” Pippa finds her beatific persona unraveling in alarming ways: the truth is that the gracious woman of the present day has seen more than her fair share of the wild side. By seventeen, Pippa had lived with a Dexedrine-addicted mother, felt the first stirrings of sexuality with a school girlfriend, had an affair with a teacher, and run away from home, set adrift on a course littered with broken hearts—until she seemingly found love and security in a family of her own. And now that established world, too, is in danger. In Pippa Lee we have an unforgettable heroine, and a quirky and acutely intelligent portrait of the many lives behind a single name. Even after we’ve read it, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is a story that is still unfurling.

Total: Stories

Rebecca Miller returns to short fiction for the first time since her collection of stories, Personal Velocity, with the arresting, darkly prescient Total. But to get back to my subject. Of the little moment when I went the wrong way, from promising young woman to flotsam, to extraneousness--like the strands that rub off a ribbon and that you cut away. Each of the seven stories in Total is a full world, painted with vivid strokes, one whose people and questions stay with the reader long after the story has ended and the book has been closed. Joad, one of the first characters we meet, finds onionskin pages crammed in a locked desk drawer while refurbishing a Hudson Valley farmhouse with her husband; the terrifying words on the fragile paper haunt Joad and their home, the woman who wrote them looming over them like a malevolent spirit. Innate in her words is the power of the act of creation and the ability of language to link people across time. Rebecca Miller, the author of The Private Lives of Pippa Lee and Jacob's Folly, returns to short fiction for the first time since her beloved collection of stories, Personal Velocity. The author and award-winning filmmaker has "the soaring eye of the epicist and the sly instinct of the satirist" (The New Yorker), and her talents are on full display in Total. From Dublin to Martha's Vineyard, from the comforting mundanities of motherhood to a technologically infected near future that mirrors our present with dark prescience, each voice and life captured in this collection is utterly unforgettable.

Short Stories & Anthologies

Personal Velocity

Contemporary

DOUBLEDAY

From the award-winning writer-director of Personal Velocity comes a startling drama about the nature of family and the meaning of ideals
In his first role since Gangs of New York, Daniel Day-Lewis plays Jack Slavin, an engineer who over thirty years ago walked away from the mainstream to live out a more deliberate life. But the island commune he began in hopes of a better future has long since imploded and he is now its final resident. Jack's only other companion is his 16-year-old daughter Rose (Camilla Belle), whom he has deliberately sheltered from the outside world. Now, beset by terminal illness, encroaching developers, and Rose's emerging womanhood, Jack faces troubling questions about the days ahead. In an attempt to provide his daughter with the kind of family she's never known, Jack invites Kathleen (Catherine Keener), the woman he's been secretly seeing on the mainland, and her sons to live with them. But rather than comforted, Rose feels betrayed and lashes out with a willful and deliberate retribution that places her innocence on the battlefield and Kathleen's safety in danger. His carefully constructed world flung out of control, Jack finds himself trapped between two headstrong women and forced to take action. With The Ballad of Jack and Rose, award-winning filmmaker Rebecca Miller has created a powerful and poetic third feature about a man who has cut himself off from a society that refuses to live up to his standards, and a young girl's sudden coming-of-age.

The Ballad of Jack and Rose

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Internationally recognized, multi-award-winning literary fiction with a sharp contemporary edge.\n"An unforgettable and powerfully poignant five-star read." - BookViral\n"This relationship, to me, has an emotional depth rarely found in other novels. . .an impassioned coming-of-age story that will stir the soul." - Literary Titan\n". . . Miller has gathered together a cast of unforgettable characters and constructed one of the most powerful and chilling stories I have ever read." - Readers' Favorite (five-star review)\nWHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE?\nA powerful story of two teens searching: one for their place in the world, the other for a reason to survive.\nAfter her mother’s sudden death, artistically gifted Megan lost her will to draw as she watched her family crumble. When her father unexpectedly moves what’s left of them halfway across the country to mend, Megan must try, yet again, to rise from the ashes and create a new existence for herself. She’s intrigued when she sees Shawn—a secluded classmate who sparks unexpected drawing inspiration.\nShawn is protecting a terrible secret and teeters on the edge of letting go. With each layer Megan strips from him, she gets hints about how broken he is. If Shawn is brave enough to open up, Megan might be his undoing—which could save his life. But when Megan learns his darkest secret, will she be able to convince him life is still worth living?\nThrough a heart-wrenching journey that immerses Megan’s entire family in the dangerous and unthinkable world Shawn lives in, Megan succumbs to certain truths about life:\nNothing happens by accident. 
We are exactly where we’re meant to be. 
We all really are here for a reason.\nReality is rarely subtle.\nTouch depicts abuses that may be difficult for some readers and is recommended for a mature audience.

Touch

Unveiled Publishing

A Woman Who

Parenting & Relationships

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

A debut collection of short fiction examines the richly varied lives of modern-day women--Greta, a cookbook editor; Nancy, a troubled nine-year-old girl; Delia, an abused wife; and others--in seven intriguing portraits of women of different ages and classes as they deal with fate, motherhood, infidelity, desperation, and other challenges of life. 45,000 first printing.

Grove Pr

A Washington Post Best Book of 2001, Rebecca Miller's powerful debut, Personal Velocity, is the basis for her Sundance Festival award-winning film by the same name. Acclaimed by The New York Times as "the work of a talented and highly visual writer," the vibrantly fresh and lustrous stories in Miller's collection explore the multifaceted lives of women in seven arresting portraits. From within the secret self of each character we see the surprising shape of her life created as she hurtles through it. 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. The story, however, ends with a poignant flashback to the moment when one morning Greta realizes that ambition has grabbed her as she looks down at her kind, lackluster husband's wing-tip shoes. She suddenly knows she is leaving him and that their marriage is effectively over. 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 walking her home from a club the night before; 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 marks the emergence of a singular new voice in American fiction. "Personal Velocity ... remind[s] us that good material is everywhere. [Miller is] a wonderful writer." -- Carolyn See, The Washington Post Book World "Rebecca Miller's debut story collection is a series of eye-opening portraits of women ... humane, always honest and always entertaining." -- Mark Rozzo, Los Angeles Times "Personal Velocity is a gutsy, striking debut." -- David Daley, The Hartford Courant "Each story is crafted with a cunning and precision that explores and often explodes the lives of Miller's subjects...." -- Laura Anderson, American-Statesman "Miller tackles her topics, and ours, with wisdom, sophistication, and guts." -- Glamour "If I were still teaching high school English, I'd order class sets of Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity." -- Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes

GROVE PRESS

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Books by Miller, Rebecca

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Miller, Rebecca. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee: A Novel

Jacob's Folly: A Novel

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee: A Novel

Total: Stories

Personal Velocity

The Ballad of Jack and Rose

Touch

A Woman Who

Personal Velocity

Personal Velocity