We at Lemuria always get excited about new voices. There is something thrilling about finding a new author, about cracking open a debut novel with the hope that you could be discovering your new favorite author. And with Southern debut authors, we can’t help but tell everyone about them, to celebrate these treasures. We Southerners are immensely proud of our literary past, but our literary future is why places like Lemuria exist — to help nurture and share with the world Mississippi’s new voices.

Mary Miller is one such Southern debut novelist, but she’s not new to us at Lemuria. We have been following her since she released her short story collection, Big World, back in 2009. Her novel, The Last Days of California, comes out January 20th, and we couldn’t be more excited to add Mary to the growing list of new Southern authors. Mary grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and at the start of the school year this fall, she will become the Grisham Writer-in-Residence at Ole Miss.

We’ll have more on Mary as her book’s release draws near, but for now, just go ahead and put the date of her signing at Lemuria on your calendar: Thursday, January 30th at 5:00, with a reading at 5:30. This is one of those events everyone will be talking about.

And if you want to know more about Mary Miller right now, here are some of our favorite links:

Mary Miller’s Tumblr

“Southern writing lives online”: an article about the new Southern writer

The Believer Review of Big World a review of Mary’s debut collection of short stories from McSweeney’s magazine, The Believer.

 

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