Animal Rights and Pornography: Stories (Soft Skull Shortlit)

Miller grew up in a cabin in the woods of Colorado and the experience of the silence, darkness and depth that grows from being raised in near solitude is evident throughout his stories, laced with the wildness, rage, and tranquility that exists in the crags of the mountains. The stories include tales of strippers, of their husbands and lovers and the helpless, ill-placed desire that is shot out of their customers, of a rape by a man of another man at a peep show in Times Square, the victim wordlessly accepting what happens to him while watching a woman dance behind glass, of fucking a woman wearing a fur coat and feeling unexplainable rage at her disregard of animal life. The story ends with the character running away into the night with the coat, "as if an animal rescued." In "Invisible Fish," a night clerk in a mall pet store tortures the animals at night until the whole place stinks of fear and rage. Dumbfounded, the store owners blugeon to death a chimpanzee, the only animal in the store that can imagine capable of such atrocities.

An assistant professor of creative writing at Metro State College in Denver, J. Eric Miller is the author of two books, Animal Rights and Pornography and Decomposition, both of which have been translated and published abroad. His stories have appeared in a number of literary journals, and he was recently a featured author at the Festival America in Vincennes, France.