Table of Contents
Praise
Praise
Praise
Praise
Also by Lydia Millet
Title Page
Sexing the Pheasant
Girl and Giraffe
Sir Henry
Thomas Edison and Vasil Golakov
Tesla and Wife
Love in Infant Monkeys
Chomsky, Rodents
Jimmy Carter’s Rabbit
The Lady and the Dragon
Walking Bird
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright Page
Praise for HOW THE DEAD DREAM
A Los Angeles Times and Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
“The writing is always flawlessly beautiful, reaching for an experience that precedes language itself.”
—Salon
“Millet’s extraordinary leap of a novel warns us that as the splendor and mystery of the natural world is replaced by the human-made, our species faces a lonely and spiritually impoverished future.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“In her novels, abstract, poetic passages bemoan the fate of humanity alongside goofy, broad-stroked depictions . . . [How the Dead Dream] is no exception . . . [it] synthesizes the two styles of Millet’s fiction—the harrowing and the madcap—with a new elegance.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“[Millet’s] best when she makes startlingly odd events seem wholly real . . . but what’s more profound is Millet’s understanding of the loneliness and alienation in a world being poisoned to death.”
—The Washington Post
“Elegantly written and intellectually sophisticated . . . [How the Dead Dream is] a frightening and gorgeous vision of human decline.”
—Utne
“What Millet has managed to do with How the Dead Dream and 2005’s wonderful atomic fable Oh Pure and Radiant Heart is to writes fiction that confronts social issues without falling into shrill hectoring or dull didacticism . . . her steady hand and subtle voice are what make them work as well as they do.”
—The Believer
“[Millet] has pulled off her funniest, most shrewdly thoughtful and touching novel. If Kurt Vonnegut were still alive, he would be extremely jealous.”
—Village Voice
Praise for OH PURE AND RADIANT HEART
A Booklist and Boldtype Best Book of the Year
“[An] extremely smart . . . resonant fantasy.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Millet . . . boldly fuses lyrical realism with precisely rendered far-out-ness to achieve a unique energy and perspicacity, the ideal approach to the most confounding reality of our era: the atomic bomb.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Lydia Millet is da bomb. Literally . . . Though Oh Pure and Radiant Heart possesses the nervy irreverence of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, Millet makes the subject matter her own, capturing the essence of these geniuses in a way that can only be described as, well, genius.”
—Vanity Fair
“Brilliant and fearless . . . Millet takes a headlong run at the subject of nuclear annihilation, weaving together black comedy, science, history, and time travel to produce, against stiff odds, a shattering and beautiful work.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“[A] unique and wide-reaching book . . . Its head soars into philosophical inquiry about love and peace and creative ambition; its heart is planted in the emotional and psychological landscape of its characters and those who have been terrorized by the bomb; and its feet are sunk firmly into the political reality of greed, manipulation, and opportunism.”
—Bloomsbury Review
“Millet is a ferocious writer with a sense of humor that is as dark as it is funny . . . [She] has written a novel with the intellectual heft of Pynchon and DeLillo—only a lot more fun to read.”
—Tucson Weekly
Praise for MY HAPPY LIFE
Winner of the PEN USA Award for Fiction
“A prodigious feat.”
—New York Times Book Review
“If there were any justice in the world, My Happy Life would become not merely a cult book, devoured by a few astonished readers every year, but an exemplar, ‘This,’ we would say, ‘is how to write a novel that is impossible to forget.’”
—Commercial Appeal
“A heart-rending novel.”
—Boston Herald
“A nightmare limned in gold.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“A biting critique of the Bush years with all their ghastly bland-ness and deceit.”—St. Petersburg Times
“The most sardonic and laugh-out-loud funny satire I’ve read in years.”
—Denver Rocky Mountain News
Praise for EVERYONE’S PRETTY
“With a sharp eye for small details, a keen sense of the absurd and strong empathy for its creations, Everyone’s Pretty is both prism and truth.”
—Washington Post Book World
“A kaleidoscopic new satire of America’s quietly freakish office workers . . . gives voice to a wide variety of life’s unbeautiful losers—and makes them sing for us.”
—Boston Globe
“A biting send-up of vapid Americana wrapped up in a hilarious novel about five desperate Angelenos in search of redemption.”
—Boldtype
“Juggling an enormous cast of psychos, Everyone’s Pretty revels in its own religious chaos, the sexually crazed repeatedly clashing with the sexually pure . . . The book impressively teeters on the edge of total inanity, each scene becoming increasingly uncomfortable, then unraveling out of control.”
—Village Voice
“Absolutely captivating . . . I picked it up, read it almost in one day—and I was pissed when I had to stop. Everyone’s Pretty is fast & furious reading that nearly hypnotizes.”
—Sex Kitten
“Everyone’s Pretty is so transgressive, so wildly and beautifully dark, that it’s like a breath of fresh air in a stale literary environment over-run with too-clever postmodernists.”
—Tucson Weekly
Also by Lydia Millet
Omnivores
George Bush, Dark Prince of Love
My Happy Life
Everyone’s Pretty
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
How the Dead Dream
Sexing the Pheasant
WHEN A BIRD LANDED on her foot the pop star was surprised. She had shot it, certainly, with her gun. Then it fell from the sky. But she had not expected the actual death thing. Its beak spurted blood. She’d never really noticed birds. Though one reviewer had compared her to a screeching harpy. That was back when she was starting. What an innocent child she was then. She’d actually gone and looked it up at the library. “One of several loathsome, voracious monsters. They have the head of a woman and the wings and claws of a bird.”
She did not appreciate the term pop star. She had told this to Larry King.
