Love in Infant Monkeys

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.

Born in Boston in 1968, Lydia Millet moved to Toronto, Canada with her Egyptologist father and teacher mother two years later. She received her Master's in Environmental Policy from Duke University and moved to New York in 1996, where she worked as a fundraiser for the Natural Resources Defense Council, then went freelance in 1999 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 (Algonquin, 1996), George Bush, Dark Prince of Love (Scribner, 2000), My Happy Life (Holt, 2002; Soft Skull, 2007), which won the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction, Everyone's Pretty (Soft Skull, 2005), Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (Soft Skull, 2005, Harcourt, 2006), and How the Dead Dream (Counterpoint, 2008; Harcourt 2009)