Elise Miller

 

Elise Frances Miller’s novel, A Time to Cast Away Stones, published by Sand Hill Review Press in June, 2012, is set in Berkeley and Paris in 1968. With her degrees from UC Berkeley and UCLA, Elise began writing as an art critic for the Los Angeles Times, Art News, The Reader, and San Diego Magazine. She taught high school and college humanities, and served as a communications director at San Diego State University and Stanford. Her short stories have appeared in The Sand Hill Review (fiction editor, 2008), Best of the Sand Hill Review, and Fault Zone: Stepping Up to the Edge. Learn more about her novel and its historical background at www.elisefmiller.com.

 

 

Time to Cast Away Stones tells the story of Janet Magill, a shy, straight-arrow Berkeley freshman with compelling reasons to join the antiwar movement. Janet’s brother has been shipped off to Vietnam, and Aaron Becker, her childhood sweetheart, might well be next. When Janet’s parents banish her from Berkeley to what they expect will be a safe, idyllic springtime in Paris, she runs headlong into the 1968 May Revolution and along the way, falls in love with a secretive Czech dissident. Far from the City of Light, Aaron makes plans to evade the draft and join Janet, but loses contact as her“safe” year abroad turns into a dangerous coming of age.