Feature Title
Love In Infant Monkeys
by Lydia Millet
Lions, Komodo dragons, dogs, monkeys, and pheasants — all have shared spotlights and tabloid headlines with celebrities such as Sharon Stone, Thomas Edison, and David Hasselhoff. Millet hilariously tweaks these unholy communions to run a stake through the heart of our fascination with famous people and pop culture.
While in so much fiction animals exist as symbols of good and evil or as author stand-ins, they represent nothing but themselves in Millet’s ruthlessly lucid prose. Implacable in their actions, the animals in Millet’s spiraling fictional riffs and flounces show up their humans as bloated with foolishness yet curiously vulnerable, as in a tour-de-force Kabbalah-infused interior monologue by Madonna after she shoots a pheasant on her Scottish estate. Millet treads newly imaginative territory with these charismatic tales.
Praise
In reviewing this collection of short stories, I’m tempted to type the 10 words, “Lydia Millet is the greatest American author of her generation” 50 times to fill up this space and just be done with it. In reality, however, I am paid to justify things beyond giddy fandom and, I’ll admit it, professional jealousy." --Eye Weekly
About the Author
Born in Boston in 1968, Lydia Millet moved to Toronto, Canada with her Egyptologist father and teacher/librarian mother two years later. She received a Master's in Environmental Policy at Duke University and moved to New York in 1996, where she worked as a fundraiser for the Natural Resources Defense Council. In 1999 she went freelance and moved to Tucson, where she now lives and writes full-time on an isolated spread in the desert. She is the author of Omnivores, George Bush, Dark Prince of Love (Scribner, 2000), My Happy Life, a winner of the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction, Everyone’s Pretty and Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. Her last book How the Dead Dream was a Globe and Mail best book of 2008.
$17.50 Paper, 208pp
978-1-59376-252-0
Soft Skull Press/Counterpoint