The Registry of Forgotten Objects: Stories

by Miles Harvey

In this haunting debut collection, best-selling author Miles Harvey probes the mysterious relationship between human longings and the secret lives of inanimate objects.

In one story, an artist discovers an uncanny ability to transform modern sculptures into priceless ancient treasures. In another, a teenager experiences visions of other people’s pasts while vandalizing their abandoned houses. In a third, a grieving couple returns again and again to the beach where their son disappeared, pulling plastic bottles, fishing nets, buoys, and other bits of beach trash from the surf “as if those random bits of wreckage were the untranslated hieroglyphs of some secret language that might help them understand their loss.”

Harvey—whose work Dave Eggers called “ludicrously unputdownable”—delivers a constellation of stories that explore the gravitational pull of material things: how they drift into and out of our hands, how they assume new meanings, and the ways they serve as conduits between the present and past, the everyday and incomprehensible. Most of all, he explores how these objects have the power to reveal strange and moving facets of the human condition.

Genres: Short Stories

200 pages, Paperback

Published August 15, 2024

About the author

Miles Harvey's new book is The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch, which National Book Award-winner Nathaniel Philbrick calls a "masterpiece" and Pulitzer Prize finalist Dave Eggers describes as a "ludicrously enjoyable, unputdownable read." It will be published by Little, Brown & Co. in July 2020.

Harvey's previous work includes The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime, a bestseller USA Today named one of the ten best books of 2000, and Painter in a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America, awarded an Editors’ Choice honor from Booklist, and a best-books citation from The Chicago Tribune. A former Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan, Harvey teaches creative writing at DePaul University, where he is a founding editor of Big Shoulders Books.

Reviews

[Jacqueline Nyathi · Rating 5 out of 5]

In *The Drought*, a weatherman turns into something of an Old Testament prophet, beard and all. *Beachcombers in Doggerland* is about a family adrift after a terrible loss. *The Man Who Slept With Eudora Welty* is a quirky nod to a literary figure. *The Complete Miracles of St Anthony: Definitive Edition With Previously Unpublished Material* was such a delightful surprise (which I can say about many of the stories in this collection). *Why I Married My Wife* recalls all of the stories of salesmen in small towns in Middle America that you’ve ever read. *The Master of Patina* is surreal on nostalgia. *The Pied Piper of Fuckit* is about suburban dystopia and two middle-aged men losing their purpose and their way.

Everything about this collection worked for me: the writing style, the structure, and the author’s intelligent, thoughtful voice. It’s very literary, delighting in the power of language and story. And if you’re watching for it, you start to realise that the stories are linked, mostly by objects and sometimes through people, belying what one of the characters in the last story thinks:

“None of these experiences overlap, none of his stories connect, and yet somehow, he thinks, they are all of one piece. That’s what he wants to say: that everything is intertwined like those stripes, everything is part of a pattern, everything rises.”

Many thanks to Mad Creek Books and to Edelweiss for a really lovely, five star read.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know that talking about "atmosphere" in fiction is not particularly helpful. But this book has atmosphere! It creates a feeling of something wonderful -- although that wonder is hard to define. It likely comes from all those objects, and some people, who recur in several stories, who stitch all of these together. And it comes from the expectation that these recurrences are going to happen. But it also comes from Harvey's creation of a world where the reader almost expects them to happen. It is a magical world!

The publisher's blurb says the book is haunted -- and that is almost right, although there is something ominous in "haunted." I don't feel the ominous in here, even in the tragic moments. Another word I am very hesitant using -- luminous. That might be what these stories, this book, are/is.

So, yes, this is a collection of short stories, and a collection subtly linked by the things that float through the stories. It is also almost a novel, a whole, even though it might have been written over many years.

Goodreads here calls this collection a debut collection. And I suppose it is. Harvey hasn't written a collection of stories before. But he has written some wonderfully researched and even more brilliantly written books of nonfiction. He is definitely a writer worth following.

[Kelly - readinginthe419 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't read a lot of short story collections, but this one thoroughly captured my imagination, and I enjoyed it immensely. The creative stories within this book examine at the relationship between human longings and the lives of inanimate objects all around us, especially how they drift into and out of our hands and how they assume new meaning as they travel through time.

What I enjoyed about this collection was the way the different objects - the detritus of other owners and other lives, show up time and again through the various stories - from a barbershop pole or a busted desk to an old rusted DeSoto or a stranger in a yellow sweater.

The stories and characters overlap in many ways as well, most particularly a grieving couple and then their daughter after the disappearance of the son from a beach where he was camping. I most enjoyed the very first one titled The Drought as well as Why I Married My Wife and the final Registry of Forgotten Objects.

I highly recommend this to short story readers and those who enjoy a creative, well-conceived fiction.

Thank you to The Ohio State University Press for my complimentary ARC of this book.

[Crystal books_inthewild · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a creative & inventive collection of short stories- all centered around the relationship between human longings and inanimate objects. The thing that makes this collection so unique are the subtle ways that the stories intersect so seamlessly & creatively.

I really liked “The Complete Miracles of St. Anthony”- a collection of miracles, intersected with the story of a priest named Father Marek. The way other characters in this collection came into the passages & impacted Father Marek “by a curious coincidence” was so cleverly conceived & well written!

I also loved how the barber shop pole is interwoven throughout multiple stories- each time these little nuggets would emerge, I would quietly applaud the author in my mind for his way with weaving stories!

I definitely recommend this to readers of creative fiction & short stories!

Thank you to Ohio State press for this early copy.
Available August 15, 2024.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing was good. I'm not a fan of short story collections, and I was disappointed that the stories weren't set in Michigan as I expected they would be. The connections made between stories was interesting. The characters seemed realistic but there was a lot of sadness.

[Ariel Waldman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I struggled to get through this collection of short stories. I was getting confused and felt like either I haven’t lived enough life to get it or the book was trying to be deep, which made it pretentious. I also did not enjoy how the author wrote women characters.

[Sean Kinch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Favorite of this collection (narrowly, among a half-dozen gems): “The Pied Piper of Fuckit.”