Presence: Stories

Synopsis

An unforgettable collection of a master storyteller's final works

Throughout his life, Arthur Miller, one of the foremost dramatists of the twentieth century, wrote highly regarded fiction—from his early novel Focus to two collections, I Don't Need You Anymore and Homely Girl. In Presence, a posthumous gathering of his last published stories, he reveals the same profound insight, humanism, and empathy that characterized his great dramatic works. The six stories included here have all appeared in major publications and each displays all the assuredness of an artist in his autumnal prime. Presence is a gift that all fans of Miller's work, as well as readers of contemporary fiction, will applaud.

The New York Times - Jeremy McCarter

After weaving through Miller's writing for decades, nostalgia moves front and center in Presence, a collection of stories he wrote in the years before his death in 2005, at 89. Originally published in The New Yorker, Harper's and elsewhere, the six stories have been arranged along the arc of a life, from a young Brooklynite's sexual awakening, through a middle-aged writer's creative and marital woes, to an old man's beachside ruminations. There's a wide streak of autobiography here, as in so much of Miller's work. But where his memoir, Timebends, often looked back in anger and frustration, the tone of these stories is gentle, wistful…