An easy read and not nearly as deceptive a read as the introduction seems to imply. Each story has sex and each story has a mostly boring main character. Somebody is leading a very dull life here.... ( )

The women, and a couple of girls, in the stories of Big World have love-dislike relationships with men. They need men, use them when necessary, and are often treated poorly in return. One sleeping with a restaurant owner: “The waitresses don’t talk to me for reasons having to do with I fuck everybody and get paid twelve dollars an hour to slice lemons.”

One woman’s idea of getting-to-know-you: “I can tell he wants me to ask him questions about this former life, so I ask if he ever cheated on his wife with a hooker.”

Like many great writers, Miller produces sentences of crystallized perfection. A husband is brutally summarized in one sentence: “He had a handful of phrases like this that made up his entire personality.”

Women don’t have it easy in Big World and the men don’t make it any easier. A woman’s relationship with her ex-husband in the title story sums up the theme of this collection in one devastating sentence: “I liked to say things to shock him, the truth. Like my father, he had sent me out into the big world all alone and I was going to show him how ugly it was.” ( )