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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.
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Photo: Ivory Orchid Photography
Lydia Millet has written more than a dozen novels and story collections. Her novel A Children's Bible was a New York Times "Best 10 Books of 2020" selection and shortlisted for the National Book Award. In 2019 her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. She also writes essays, opinion pieces, book reviews, and other ephemera and has worked as an editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity since 1999. She lives in the desert outside Tucson with her family.
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