New Travel Novel: ‘Dear American Airlines’
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 05.28.08 | 10:46 AM ET
Author: Jonathan Miles
Released: April 29, 2008
Travel genre: Fiction—the literature of “Airworld”
Territory covered: Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, the life of protagonist Bennie Ford
Promo copy: “Dear American Airlines is the scathingly funny, deeply moving story of a stranded passenger whose enraged letter of complaint transforms into a lament for a life gone awry. Bennie Ford, a fifty-three-year-old failed poet turned translator, is traveling to his estranged daughter’s wedding when his flight is canceled. Stuck with thousands of fuming passengers in the purgatory of O’Hare Airport, he watches the clock tick and realizes that he will miss the ceremony. Frustrated, irate, and helpless, Bennie does the only thing he can: he starts to write a letter. But what begins as a hilariously excoriating demand for a refund soon becomes a cri de coeur of a life misspent, talent wasted, opportunities botched, and happiness lost.”
Critical verdict, Zagat-style: Miles “has a knack for pinning down the sort of whimsy that pops into the head of a person who is terminally grounded.” (Wall Street Journal) “Turn to nearly any page and you’ll find a funny, smart, touching, wonderfully caustic or well-turned sentence or paragraph. ... There’s a protracted, out-of-time quality to the narrative that fits neatly with a story about a guy stranded in an airport with little to run up against beyond his own past and future.” (Chicago Tribune).
Read: An excerpt.
Find it: Amazon, Powell’s, author
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
Yesh Prabhu 06.03.08 | 7:43 AM ET
Very rarely do we read a first novel as charming as this. Jonathan Mile’s prose is mesmerizing. This novel is witty, hilarius, caustic, and at times heart-breaking too, and very entertaining. How did the author accomplish this feat? By letting his imagination fly, and also with the magic of his pen, I suppose. An altogether marvelous achievement.
Peter 06.14.08 | 10:16 AM ET
Sounds like a great read, I’ll definitely keep an eye out for it. I’m reading a great non-fiction travel book at the moment called Chasing Sunsets by Lawrence Pane and his family. He, his wife and young son took off on a six year circumnavigation of the world by boat and the book is a documentation of their adventures.
My wife and I even used Chasing Sunsets as our travel guide for a recent European holiday we went on and it worked great! Being written by an average guy instead of a professional travel writer made all the difference to me. The descriptions of the various locales were always entertaining and it was great to have the three different perspectives of Father, Mother and Son to draw upon – gives you a better feel for how different people view different places.