Dear American Airlines
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Bennie Ford, a fifty-three-year-old failed poet turned translator, is traveling to his estranged daughterβs wedding when his flight is cancelled. Stuck with thousands of fuming passengers in the purgatory of OβHare airport, he watches the clock tick and realizes that he will miss the ceremony. Frustrated, irate, and helpless, Bennie does the only thing he can: he starts to write a letter. But what begins as a hilariously excoriating demand for a refund soon becomes a cris de coeur of a life misspent, talent wasted. Bennie pens his letter in a voice that is a marvel of lacerating wit, heart-on-sleeve emotion, and wide-ranging eruditionβall propelled by the fading hope that if he can just make it to the wedding, he has a chance to do something right in his life.
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Jonathan Miles is the author of Dear American Airlines, Want Not, and Anatomy of a Miracle. A former columnist for the New York Times, he is a contributing editor to such magazines as Details, Garden & Gun, Menβs Journal, and Field & Stream. His work is frequently anthologized in Best American Sports Writing and Best American Crime Writing. A former longtime resident of Oxford, Mississippi, he currently lives along the Delaware River in rural New Jersey.
Mark Bramhall has won the prestigious Audie Award for best narration, more than thirty AudioFile Earphones Awards, and has repeatedly been named by AudioFile magazine and Publishers Weekly among their βBest Voices of the Year.β He is also an award-winning actor whose acting credits include off-Broadway, regional, and many Los Angeles venues as well as television, animation, and feature films. He has taught and directed at the American Academy of Dramatic Art.
