Lydia Millet

"A stunning new novel from the author of A Children's Bible, a National Book Award finalist and one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2020. Over twelve novels and two collections Lydia Millet has emerged as a major American novelist. Hailed as "a writer without limits" (Karen Russell) and "a stone-cold genius" (Jenny Offill), Millet makes fiction that vividly evokes the ties between people and other animals and the crisis of extinction. Her exquisite...

Lydia Millet's chilling new novel is the first-person account of a young mother, Anna, escaping her cold and unfaithful husband, a businessman who's just launched his first campaign for political office. When Ned chases Anna and their six-year-old daughter from Alaska to Maine, the two go into hiding in a run-down motel on the coast. But the longer they stay, the less the guests in the dingy motel look like typical tourists-and the less Ned resembles...

This stunning novel introduces Susan Lindley, a woman adrift after her husband's death. Suddenly gifted her great uncle's Pasadena mansion, Susan decides to restore his extensive collection of preserved animals, tending to 'the fur and feathers, the beaks, the bones and shimmering tails.' Meanwhile, a menagerie of uniquely damaged humans joins her in residence. Funny and heartbreaking, Magnificence is the story of a woman emerging from the sudden...

At the opening of My Happy Life, the unnamed narrator of this bittersweet fictional memoir has been abandoned in a locked room of a defunct hospital for the mentally ill. She hasn't seen the nice man who brings her food in days; she's eaten the soap and the toothpaste; she tried to eat the plaster on her walls, a dietary adventure that ended none too well. And yet, curiously, the narrator is happy. Despite a lifetime of neglect, physical abuse, and...

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. In this critically acclaimed collection, Lydia Millet hilariously tweaks these unholy communions to run a stake through the heart of our fascination with famous people and pop culture in wildly inventive stories that evoke the spectrum of human feeling and also its limits....

"A personal evocation of the glory of nature, our vexed position in the animal kingdom, and the difficulty of adoring what we destroy. Acclaimed novelist Lydia Millet's first work of nonfiction, We Loved It All, is a genre-defying tour de force that makes an impassioned argument for people to see their emotional and spiritual lives as infinitely dependent on the lives of nonhuman beings. Drawing on a quarter-century of experience as an advocate for...

Cara's mother is missing and the rest of her family is ignoring the problem or is busy with other things. But when a watery spector begins to haunt the family's Cape Cod home, Cara and her brothers realize their scientist mother may not have been who they thought she was. With the help of Cara's best friend Hayley, the brothers and sisters embark on a quest that will lead them from Cape's hidden, ancient places to a shipwreck at the bottom of the...