FOMITE

A roadside museum with a link to the supernatural. A washed up pitching phenom remaking his life as a minor league mascot. An elderly magician concealing a devastating secret. A grown-up high school bully obsessed with her former classmate’s glass eye. In Museum of the Americas, Gary Lee Miller presents a remarkable collection of stories that push the boundaries between the real and the fantastic, the universe that is seen and the one that is invisible. There are no easy answers here, no moralistic judgments, just people struggling against stacked odds to bring redemption to their lives.  

About the Author

Gary Lee Miller learned to tell stories in the bar rooms of northern Pennsylvania and at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he earned his MFA. His work has appeared in a number of literary magazines, including Florida Review, Green Mountains Review, Hunger Mountain, and Chicago Quarterly Review. Gary’s music writing can be found in Seven Days, Vermont’s weekly source for arts, culture, and politics. He sings and plays guitar in The TrailerBlazers, a strictly hillbilly outfit.

Praise

“Vivid and arresting; the stories have a gentle fabulism that grows darker as Miller plumbs the human psyche.” 

— Steve Almond 

“The short story strikes me as the most demanding of literary forms. Like the lyric poem, it can afford no false moves, but unlike much lyric, it must limn a wide and credible world. Story by story, Gary Miller's Museum of the Americas accomplishes this astonishing end. Most remarkable, perhaps, is that it does so, revealing the inner and outer lives of its characters, in the manner of short-fiction geniuses like Munro and Trevor: that is, without rodomontade, without bells and whistles, without the least look-ma-no-hands gesture. We finish a given tale and find ourselves suddenly dazzled: how far we have ranged– how did we travel so widely without ever having quite been conscious of how we were transported? This collection represents art in its truest sense.”

— Sydney Lea, Vermont Poet Laureate

Reviews & Interviews

“Each of these stories ushers us into a new, fully imagined world, as redolent of elsewhere as the soil samples in the Museum of the Americas, and Miller evokes those elsewheres with sharp observation and colloquial ease.”

— Margot Harrison, Seven Days

Read the whole review...

“Words to note: Gary Lee Miller’s name is going to be recognized in American letters for a very long time.”

— Stacey Peters, The Dooryard (from the introduction to an interview with Gary

Read the interview... archive site, no active links

Gary reads at The Museum of Everyday Life

Get the whole story...