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A fast-moving, heartbreaking collection of linked stories that evokes the joy and alienation between generations and classes in the era of mass overwhelm.
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 neighbors after finding obscene notes in their mailbox; a pretentious academic accused of plagiarism; and a suburban ex-marathoner dad obsessed with hosting refugees in a tiny house in his backyard.
"As she did in such novels as Dinosaurs (2022) and A Children's Bible (2020), Millet blends a blunt assessment of our refusal to deal with the ecological catastrophes we have created and a tender portrait of human beings with all their foibles. Sharply observed, beautifully rendered, and heartbreaking." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
This information about Atavists was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Ivory Orchid Photography
Lydia Millet is the author of A Children's Bible, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top Ten book of the Year. Her first work of short fiction, Love in Infant Monkeys, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010; her second, Fight No More (2018), won an American Academy of Arts and Sciences short fiction award. Ativists is her third work of short fiction. She lives outside Tucson, Arizona.
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At times, our own light goes out, and is rekindled by a spark from another person.
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