Books
You Are Loved
Southeast Missouri State University Press
2024
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Winner of the Nilsen Literary Prize
As a young man living in New Orleans just after the turn of the century, Dixon Still is trying to find himself. Thirty years later, as an older man living in San Francisco, Dixon has arrived at a clearer sense of self, but he still finds something missing in his otherwise happy life. You Are Loved tells Dixon’ s story through two interconnected novellas, first when he is a young, aspiring photographer who has an affair with a married woman that brings about a coming of age both in terms of his art and his sexuality, and then thirty years later when he is a happily married museum curator whose life grows increasingly complicated through a web of open sexual relationships and professional expectations. You Are Loved attempts to reconcile Dixon’ s past notions of sex, love, and gender with his present ones, and in doing so limns the vast shifts in consciousness that occurred in the interim.
The two novellas in Andrew Malan Milward’s You Are Loved offer a kind of longing and love in a voice that wins our affection and dares us to listen. It is deeply confessional, smart, and beautifully told. It’s no surprise that he has resurrected the novella form and I’m here for it. — Brandon Hobson, National Book Award finalist and author of The Removed
What a goddamn pleasure to read these new novellas from the always brilliant Andrew Malan Milward. One can sense the influences of DeLillo and Salter here, but there is also a clear propulsiveness in Milward’s grappling with the human heart with all its love and agony. Beautiful, beautiful work. — Christian Kiefer, author of The Heart of It All
You Are Loved paints a stirring portrait of desire’s myriad complexities. With graceful, evocative prose and rich, vibrant characterization, Andrew Malan Milward presents modern love and sexuality in a captivatingly honest light, complete with deception, heartache, joy, and chaos. The beauty of this book lies not only in its frank depiction of complicated courtships, but also in its elegant portrayal of how our past injuries reflect our present cruelties. A provocative, deeply moving book. — James Han Mattson, author of Reprieve
In the two novellas that comprise You Are Loved, Andrew Malan Milward has created a vessel into which readers may pour themselves, luxuriating in language so confident, so pitch perfect, that hours will go by before remembering to emerge again from these pages. Following the artistic and sexual awakening of Dixon Still in two of our most compelling cities—New Orleans and San Francisco—and spanning the first thirty years of the twenty-first century, we accompany this flâneur-photographer into bookstores and art galleries, restaurants and hotel rooms, where he inevitably confronts himself and the world, even as the clock of his life—and our increasingly fragile planet’s—ticks by. — Jeffrey Condran, author of Claire, Wading into the Danube By Night
Jayhawker
University Press of Kansas
2019
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Wars ravage Iraq and Afghanistan. An earthquake devastates Haiti. The economy is in crisis and America is in the death grip of partisan politics. But what really, really gets you down? Your college basketball team loses a key game. It kind of makes a person wonder—first, of course, about his priorities, but then, inevitably, about the nature of such an obsession, one clearly shared with millions of sports fans spanning the United States. In a book that begins with one fan’s passion for a game, Andrew Malan Milward takes a deep dive into sports culture, team loyalty, and a shared sense of belonging—and what these have to do with character, home, and history.
At the University of Kansas—where the inventor of the sport coached its first team—basketball is a religion, and Milward is a devoted follower with a faith that has grown despite time and distance. Jayhawker, his first venture into nonfiction, bears the marks of the accomplished storyteller. Sharply observed, deftly written, and often as dramatic as its subject, the book pairs personal memoir with cultural history to conduct us from the world of the athlete to the literary life, from competition to camaraderie, from the history of the game to the game as a reflection of American history at its darkest hour and in its shining moments. A journey through one man’s obsession with basketball, Jayhawker: On History, Home, and Basketball tells a quintessential American story.
“Andrew Malan Milward brings a creative writer’s touch to two subjects—basketball and Kansas history—close to the heart of all Jayhawks. Now I know why every KU win feels like a birthright, and every loss like the sacking of Lawrence.”—Robert Rebein, author of Headlights on the Prairie: Essays on Home
I Was A Revolutionary
HarperCollins
2015
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Winner of Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award and the Friends of American Writers Literature Award.
Grounded in place, spanning the Civil War to the present day, the stories in I Was a Revolutionary capture the roil of history through the eyes of an unforgettable cast of characters: the visionaries and dreamers, radical farmers and socialist journalists, quack doctors and protestors who haunt the past and present landscape of the state of Kansas.
In these stories, the award-winning writer Andrew Malan Milward crafts an epic mosaic of the American experience, tracing how we live amid the inconvenient ghosts of history. “The Burning of Lawrence” vibrates with the raw terror of a town pillaged by pro-Confederate raiders. “O Death” recalls the desperately hard journey of the Exodusters—African-American migrants who came to Kansas to escape oppression in the South. And, in the collection’s haunting title piece, a professor of Kansas history surveys his decades-long slide from radicalism to complacency, a shift that parallels the landscape around him.
Using his own home state as a prism through which to view both a nation’s history and our own universal battles as individuals, Milward has created one of the freshest and most complex story collections in recent years.
“In this brilliant, inventive collection, Milward channels ghosts from his native Kansas into eight stories that could spring only from that fraught border of the Civil War.” — New York Times Book Review
“The rich, brutal history of Kansas ignites—and propels—the eight stories that make up Andrew Malan Milward’s accomplished second collection. By its conclusion, the reader is left considering many questions of history, identity, race, and how we retell these stories to others and ourselves.” — Boston Globe
“The eight stories in Milward’s collection don’t just use history as a jumping-off point, they also raise questions about the nature of recorded history. Each one feels as complete and complex as a novel. Even better, each story is distinct, but benefits from its nearness to the others. . . . This collection is sharp, shrewd, and consistently thought provoking.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Riveting fiction in which Milward’s fascination with his home state’s history serves the plot and characters rather than the other way around. . . . unlike many young writers, his gaze isn’t directed at his own navel, but outward at the rough, strange history of the state that formed him.” — The Millions
“A fast-paced page-turner of a book, with Milward weaving together fictional narrative, historical fact and illusory anecdotes so seamlessly you won’t be aware of how much you’ve read or learned until you’re already done.” — Bookreporter.com
“He sets a standard for the story collection. This collection brims with accessible originality, unparalleled range and thought-provoking heartbreak. . . . Like E.L. Doctorow in ‘Ragtime,’ Milward fashions high art from historical events and figures.” — Jackson Clarion-Ledger
“This is an evocative and provoking collection, full of Andrew Milward’s inventive craft.” — New York Journal of Books
“Milward is a protégé of Marilynne Robinson and Tim O’Brien, and it shows in the way he takes well-worn history book anecdotes and transforms them into something human, raw, and immediate...I adored it―it’s one of my absolute favorites of the year.” — Book Riot
“The challenge of turning history into short stories is met by Milward, who mines his home state, Kansas, to put life into characters pulled from time’s landslide. . . . With his portrayal of conscience-ridden individuals navigating historical forces, Milward has achieved a landmark feat in fiction.” — Asheville Citizen-Times
“Throughout the book, Milward makes astute observations about politics, not only about the political climate of past eras but also of our own-a rarity in contemporary American fiction.” — BookPage
“[I Was A Revolutionary] is a book about history: how the past is viewed, how that view changes with time and from viewer to viewer, and what those changes mean....fascinating.” — AV Club
“Lyrical prose beautifully illuminates the complex history of Kansas as Milward tells stories about universal themes, revealing truths only found in fiction.” — KMUW/Wichita Public Radio
“Andrew Malan Milward’s new collection, I Was a Revolutionary, grows complex narratives from these obscure and captivating historical fragments. His writing is quiet, beautiful, and harrowing, bringing life to people and places you thought you knew. It’s a book powered by the past, if not consumed by it.” — KCUR.ORG/KANSAS PUBLIC RADIO
“Andrew Malan Milward’s new collection, I Was a Revolutionary, grows complex narratives from these obscure and captivating historical fragments. His writing is quiet, beautiful, and harrowing, bringing life to people and places you thought you knew. It’s a book powered by the past, if not consumed by it.” — Diane Cook, author of Man V. Nature
“The writing is always bold, the stakes are always high...I Was A Revolutionary recalls W. G. Sebald in its interweaving of historical memory and present concerns, and Aleksandar Hemon in its understanding that fragments can set off adventures.” — Will Chancellor, author of A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall
“Not since Edward P. Jones have I encountered a writer who so brilliantly captures a specific place, imbuing it with new life and impressive nuance. A tremendous collection that I won’t ever forget.” — Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans
“Milward’s collection is both political and a love song. Milward’s aching ballads are about Kansas, in particular, but in their brilliant, kaleidoscopic view of history, they offer penetrating insight about America as a whole. Read this book.” — Elliott Holt, author of You Are One of Them
“Andrew Malan Milward summons the history of his home state with grace, wit, and kaleidoscopic brilliance. These stories are haymakers, bloody and wild and just the thing we need to wake up and fight. Haunting and beautiful and required reading for anyone who cares about the soul of America.” — Jim Gavin, author of Middle Men
“Andrew Malan Milward is a subtle writer with an unsparing eye and a heart as vast as the prairie...a writer to cheer for.” — Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
“Spanning a hundred and fifty years in the history of Kansas, the eight vivid and masterfully linked stories in I Was A Revolutionary are a stunning example of the importance of ‘place’ in literature. Without a doubt, Andrew Malan Milward is one of the smartest and most inventive writers working today.” — Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff and The Devil All the Time
“Kansas bursts from the pages of this ingenious, dazzling collection. Andrew Malan Milward turns his home state into an enthralling main character, escorting us through corridors of history and mythology into the very core of the country.” — Shawn Vestal, author of Godforsaken Idaho
“Andrew Malan Milward has rendered the tangled, dark and ever-hopeful American heart with such precision and ache that I could almost hear it beating as I read. This collection is both luminous and necessary.” — Ramona Ausubel, author of No One is Here Except All of Us and A Guide to Being Born
“I was stunned by how moving I found these stories. They were deeply relevant to me as an American and red-blooded member of the human race, in all our grief and fury and bravery and hopefulness. Milward’s achievement is-dare I say it?-revolutionary.” — Alan Heathcock, author of Volt
The Agriculture Hall of Fame
University of Massachusetts Press
2012
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Winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction and the ForeWord’s First-Fiction Prize.
These powerful stories limn the complexities and dilemmas of life in Kansas, a state at "the center of the center of America," as a billboard in one story announces. Andrew Malan Milward explores the less visible aspects of the Kansas experience—where its agrarian past comes into conflict with the harsh present reality of drugs, fundamentalism, and corporatism, relegating its agrarian identity to museums and amusement parks. Presented in a triptych, the stories in Milward's debut collection range across a varied terrain, from tumbledown rural barns to modern urban hospitals, revealing the secrets contained therein.
"The 10 gorgeous stories that make up this Juniper Prize-winning debut collection from Milward, a Kansas native and Iowa M.F.A. graduate, offer unique glimpses into Midwestern calamities and the folks who find themselves affected by them. In Milward's world, there's nary a sunny sky in sight, with characters who are "all reversed in some ways, our lives shading backwards like the shadows on the moon." But this gloominess is greatly buoyed by the author's poetic prose and a pitch-perfect eye for detail, resulting in one tender, tragic portrait after another. STARRED REVIEW—Publishers Weekly
"The ten stories in Andrew Malan Milward's The Agriculture Hall of Fame are set in "the center of America": Kansas. And they are all, in their own unique ways, wild, hopeful, and devastating. So much is communicated in so little--a story that barely makes three pages packs a gut punch or two along the way."—ForeWord
"Milward's characters are so colorfully drawn, so carefully and deliberately described, that there appears always to be hope; a second chance is just around the corner, there is some glorious redemption just beyond the pages we are given."—The Rumpus
"I'm clearly biased about the 'place' of these stories, but the stories stand up. They're not just good Kansas stories; they're good stories period. I can't wait to see what Milward does next."—TheStoryIsTheCurse.blogspot.com
"With The Agriculture Hall of Fame, Milward often embraces the archetypes of Midwestern life while at the same time refusing to be defined by them, and in the end, the collection feels Midwestern, yet at the same time, it feels like an incredibly strong group of stories, no matter where they happen to take place."—Word/Sound
"Andrew Malan Milward is a subtle writer with an unsparing eye and a heart as vast as a prairie. The ten stories in his first book, The Agriculture Hall of Fame, are graceful evocations of loss—of fathers and first loves, of lakes and sisters, of the rusting midwestern heartland one sees from a bus window as it pulls away. An evocative debut from a writer to cheer for."—Lauren Groff, author of Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories and Arcadia
"Andrew Malan Milward is an exceptionally gifted and mature storyteller, attentive to the intricacies of character and place. There's no showing off here, no macho posturing, no coy evasion, no attention-demanding voice or ploy. This debut collection is wise, patient, vivid, and deep. One gets the impression that these stories were written slowly and with great care. Further, one gets the refreshing impression that the author sincerely needed to write them."—Chris Bachelder, Juniper Prize contest judge and author of Abbott Awaits: A Novel
"The Kansas of The Agriculture Hall of Fame is brokedown, hardluck country. Andrew Malan Milward's precarious, paralyzed people are lost in place, and know it, alternately circling and fleeing the center of the center of America. As one says, 'Out here, everybody's crazy with looking for something.' Wry and sad, this is a fine debut collection."—Stewart O'Nan, author of The Odds
"Two sons struggle to understand their Vietnam Vet father. A mother rejects her meth-addicted son. A farmer's life becomes tied—fatally—to his barn. A brother and sister speak with heartbreaking humor about everything but the cancer killing her. These beautiful stories, ranging the cities and towns of Kansas from Ulysses to El Dorado, are as intimate and compassionate as they are unflinching. Andrew Malan Milward has made of the Sunflower State a doorway into the American soul."—Naeem Murr, author of The Perfect Man