December 25 - Kate Milliken

Tonight on Bibliocracy, Christmas Day, 8 PM on KPFK:  KATE MILLIKEN.  It’s a real pleasure to celebrate a long-time writer whose individual successes add up lately to recognition and celebration.  For my guest Kate Milliken this comes from winning the University of Iowa’s most excellent John Simmons Short Fiction Award for If I’d Known You Were Coming, a collection of twelve just plain breathtaking short stories.  Kate Milliken’s characters don’t so much try to reconcile absence and loss as live with it, work it, and test its power.  Milliken’s voice and stylized, economical prose is striking in its engagement with what is gone, missing – nearly and sometimes as if what is gone is a character itself.  Milliken’s characters are mostly missing parents, missing children, missing in all senses of the word.  Kate Milliken’s stories have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Fiction, New Orleans Review, and, yes, Santa Monica Review. This is a gorgeous and totally satisfying collection of stories. If you’d like more rhapsodic appreciation from me, check out the review I posted over at OC Bookly:  http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2013/12/kate_milliken.php.  Thanks for listening.  Happy Holidays from The Bibliofella.