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Dear American Airlines. By Jonathan Miles. 192 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $22.
Dear American Airlines
by Jonathan Miles
A layover in life?
We’ve all had to go through it: Surprise thunderstorm or booking glitch leaves us twice removed from the familiar, stranded in a foreign city and further quarantined to an uninhabitable terminal. Sure, most of us can get through it by retreating to our light reading, but Bennie will have quite a different experience. In his lauded first novel, Dear American Airlines, Jonathan Miles traces the tale of Bennie, who finds himself alone and without a flight at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. But what starts out as an angry letter to an air carrier becomes a meditation on his layover in life. With a sharp, crisp voice, Miles tells one man’s story, with forays into Poland, California, and the Holocaust. Though probably not through a support representative, Bennie is bound to learn something important about where he’s come from and where he is going.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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