“His first idol was Andrew Jackson.” I managed to mess this one up pretty good. I started reading Lydia Millet books a few years ago, and when her new story collection Fight No More came out, I grabbed a few more off the shelf. I ended up reading Magnificence, which was one of the newer novels, and found it compelling but a little confusing. Then later I read Ghostlights, and found it both the same, and also oddly familiar, but I couldn’t place why exactly. […]

“When the bird landed on her foot the pop star was surprised.” This is an early collection of short fiction by Lydia Millet, whose books I recently found out were all on Hoopla, and I felt so rich in Millet, I over-borrowed. I was thinking this collection would be a lot like a lot of early collections, good, but no novels, and I am wrong. This is a really fun and great collection, and even better, short! Some of the stories: A recounting of the […]

“When he decided to leave New York, he chose Arizona because of some drone footage he’d seen.” Lydia Millet most previous novel A Children’s Bible was a much more explicit rendering of an apocalyptic future in which climate change had forever taken its toll on humanity, and all that was left was the shouting (mostly pillaging and murder). It was also a kind of retelling of A High Wind in Jamaica. This novel more or less addresses the same basic question: what’s to become of us? The difference […]

I guess when I read the follow up to this book and thought, oh it’s called a trilogy but it’s NOT REALLY a trilogy, I might have been wrong? I was reading this one and the plot partially involves a 50 year old man who works for the the IRS believing that his wife, with whom he kind of does and doesn’t have an open relationship with, is cheating on him, or if they do kind of have an open relationship, then sleeping with someone […]