Atavists
Stories
Published on 22. April 2025
Book
Hardback
240 pages
978-1-324-07441-0 (ISBN)
Description
From Lydia Millet-"the American writer with the funniest, wisest grasp on how we fool ourselves" (Chicago Tribune)-comes an inventive new collection of short fiction. Atavists follows a group of families, couples and loners in their collisions, confessions and conflicts in a post-pandemic America of artificially lush lawns, beauty salons, tech-bro mansions, assisted-living facilities, big-box stores, gastropubs, college campuses and medieval role-playing festivals.
The various "-ists" who people these linked stories-from futurists to insurrectionists to cosmetologists-include a professor who's morbidly fixated on an old friend's Instagram account; a woman convinced that her bright young son-in-law is watching geriatric porn; a bodybuilder who lives an incel's fantasy life; a couple who surveil the neighbours after finding obscene notes in their mailbox; a pretentious academic accused of plagiarism; and a suburban ex-marathoner father obsessed with hosting refugees in a tiny house in his garden.
The various "-ists" who people these linked stories-from futurists to insurrectionists to cosmetologists-include a professor who's morbidly fixated on an old friend's Instagram account; a woman convinced that her bright young son-in-law is watching geriatric porn; a bodybuilder who lives an incel's fantasy life; a couple who surveil the neighbours after finding obscene notes in their mailbox; a pretentious academic accused of plagiarism; and a suburban ex-marathoner father obsessed with hosting refugees in a tiny house in his garden.
Reviews / Votes
"Very few writers can make the apocalypse hilarious and sentimental. Millet is the kind of contemporary genius who should be at every book festival and on every creative writing course." -- Stuart Kelly - Scotland on Sunday "[Millet] knows how to put a story together. How to pace drama and consummate tension, when to turn up the volume and when to leave us alone with what she's put in motion." -- Fiona Maazel - The New York Times "Although optimism is understandably in short supply, Millet delivers her doom with a generous dose of subversive humour... Millet has an excellent ear for dialogue, and her characters are endearing." -- Mia Levitin - Financial Times "All this tension, which Millet renders keenly and readably, is built and released in the face of immense and existential forces of undoing... the stories are presented conventionally, in clean, polished prose." -- Leo Lasdun - Los Angeles Review of Books "Millet playfully skewers Los Angeles liberals while leaving their social concerns quietly intact on the page... in the hands of the Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist these characters arrive fully formed, complex and warm." -- Maria Crawford - Financial Times, 'Best summer books of 2025: Fiction'More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Illustrations
13 black-and-white illustrationstrations
Dimensions
Height: 210 mm
Width: 144 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
342 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-324-07441-0 (9781324074410)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Person
Lydia Millet is the author of A Children's Bible, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times "10 Best Books" of the year. Her first collection of short fiction, Love in Infant Monkeys, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She works at the Center for Biological Diversity and lives outside Tucson, Arizona.