Want Not: A Corrosively Funny Literary Novel of Desire, Debt, and Colliding Worlds - Softcover

A New York Times Notable Book

“A wonderful book, and there’s no one I would not urge to read it . . . This is the work of a fluid, confident and profoundly talented writer who gets more fluid, more confident and seemingly more talented even within the book itself.” —Dave Eggers, New York Times Book Review

A highly inventive and corrosively funny story of our times, Want Not exposes three different worlds in various states of disrepair—a young freegan couple living off the grid in New York City; a once-prominent linguist, sacked at midlife by the dissolution of his marriage and his father’s losing battle with Alzheimer’s; and a self-made debt-collecting magnate, whose brute talent for squeezing money out of unlikely places has yielded him a royal existence, trophy wife included.

Want and desire propel these characters forward toward something, anything, more, until their worlds collide, briefly, randomly, yet irrevocably, in a shattering ending that will haunt readers long after the last page is turned.

“Shrewd, funny, and sometimes devastating . . . What Want Not does best, though, isn’t plotting but portraits of humanity: the small epiphanies and private hurts of every person whose life, like the detritus they produce, is as beautifully mundane and unique as a fingerprint.” —Entertainment Weekly

“An impassioned work of fiction.” —Dallas Morning News

[author photo] Jonathan Miles is a former columnist for the New York Times and a contributing editor to magazines as diverse as Field & Stream and Details. He writes regularly for the New York Times Book Review and Literary Review (UK). A former longtime resident of Oxford, Mississippi, he currently lives with his family in rural New Jersey.