Praise for Choke Box
"Christina Milletti’s Choke Box is a razor-sharp page-turner that, as it hurtles to its conclusion, explores motherhood, guilt, marriage, and so much else while toying with the reliability of memory and narrative itself. This is an unforgettable, original, and satisfying read." —Sabina Murray
"The velocity of its intelligence and its wit, and the grace of its language, makes Christina Milletti's Choke Box a wild, audacious and utterly pleasurable ride." —Carole Maso
"The fem-noir is, perhaps, a story you'd die to tell or one you'd die telling." —American Book Review
"Christina Milletti is a comic genius, a gorgeous stylist, and a master of inventiveness, who challenges all our assumptions about domesticity. A man, his wife. His book, her knife. Her cunning counter-memoir. Choke Box will keep you guessing, and its delightfully slippery narrator will charm you as she sets the record straight." —Mary Caponegro
"Choke Box is a chilling and wonderfully thrilling, lyrical book that will send its readers on a journey through truth, violence, and language, straight up to the tantalizing border of bodies and brains. Christina Milletti has forged a gorgeous monster." —Samantha Hunt
"Milletti's debut is a bracing cri de coeur against the silencing of women's voices . . . Milletti is always entertaining in her dismantling of the madwoman in the attic trope, making for a sharp, playful novel." ―Publishers Weekly
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Juniper Prize for Fiction
When Edward Tamlin disappears while writing his memoir, Jane Tamlin (his wife and the mother of his young children) begins to write a secret, corrective “counter-memoir” of her own. Calling the book Choke Box, she reveals intimate, often irreverent, details about her family and marriage, rejecting—and occasionally celebrating—her suspected role in her husband’s disappearance.
Choke Box isn’t Jane’s first book. From her room in the Buffalo Psychiatric Institute, she slowly reveals a hidden history of the ghost authorship that has sabotaged her family and driven her to madness. Her latest work, finally written under her own name, is designed to reclaim her dark and troubled story. Yet even as Jane portrays her life as a wife, mother, and slighted artist with sardonic candor, her every word is underscored by one belief above all others: the complete truth is always a secret. But the stories we tell may help us survive—if they don’t kill us first.
Order at Talking Leaves Books
or Amazon
Praise for
The Religious & Other Fictions
"Be careful what stories you invent, for they may turn out to be not only true to life but truer than life."
—Brian Evenson
"A writer of gifted prose is among us again.”
—Paul West
"Christina Milletti has a knife-thrower’s flourish and aim, a fiction of ease and ferocity. It’s hard to tell order from disorder in her stories, the lavish from the spare—they meet in a super-clarity of language that is wondrous, as dark as it is illuminating."
—Janet Kauffman
The Religious & Other Fictions
Watch out what you wish for. A mother’s whim is granted when she disappears at the kitchen sink. Two boys bounce up and don’t come down. A housewife conjures a light bulb salesman who materializes for dinner.
With one foot in the real world, the other in the land of fable, Christina Milletti takes stock of the beliefs we harbor in the face of failed hopes, the power personal myths hold over us all. In her stunning debut collection, our most private sanctuaries are peeled back, their hearts made bare, by an inventive new writer who Carol Shields calls, “a genuine magician.”
Available from Carnegie Mellon University Press.
Order at Talking Leaves Books
or Amazon