Lydia Millet

An indelible novel of teenage alienation and adult complacency in an unraveling world.

A Novel

A Children's Bible

Dinosaurs

A satirical tale by the Pulitzer Prize-finalist author of Love in Infant Monkeys follows the experiences of a honeymooning couple whose happiness is interrupted by mermaids, kidnappers and mercenaries. 15,000 first printing.

Mermaids in Paradise

Longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction:

Sweet Lamb of Heaven

After her husband's death, Susan Lindley moves into her late, great uncle's Pasadena mansion and restores his taxidermy collection while being joined in the residence by an equally strange human menagerie in the new novel from the author of Ghost Lights. 10,000 first printing.

Magnificence: A Novel

In a world plagued by global warming and controlled by pharmaceutical corporations, seventeen-year-old Nat and her hacker brother Sam uncover government secrets as they race to protect their family and forge their own path to hope.

Pills and Starships

When a shy librarian in Santa Fe sees Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard, she risks her career and relationships to follow them, building a cult following comprised of hippies, bikers, anthropologists, and survivors of the atom bomb to mount a massive march on Washington. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

Twelve interlocking stories set in Los Angeles describe a broken family through the homes they inhabit.

Stories

Fight No More

Even though she is trapped within the walls of a mental hospital where she eats soap, toothpaste, and even wall plaster in search of a dietary adventure, the narrator is happy and has faith in the goodwill of others, loves her enemies, and finds solace in

My Happy Life

A personal evocation of the glory of nature, our vexed position in the animal kingdom, and the difficulty of adoring what we destroy.

A Memory of Life

We Loved It All

Ewangelia dzieciństwa

Suspecting his wife, Susan, is cheating on him with a younger coworker, Hal drunkenly volunteers to search for their missing boss who vanished in a tropical jungle in Belize.

Ghost Lights

An uproarious, biting political satire about one ex-con’s obsession with the 41st president, from the author of A Children's Bible—a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction and one of the New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of the year. "Some women like muscle. Brute strength, or the illusion of it. Their idea of an attractive man is a craggy meatpacker with a squirrel brain, who likes to crush vermin with his bare fist. I call these women Reaganites....Personally, I've always preferred the underdog." Rosemary is an ex-con with no viable career prospects, a boyfriend old enough to be her grandfather, and a major obsession with our nation's forty-first president, whom she fondly refers to as "G.B." Unexpectedly smitten during his inaugural address, Rosemary is soon anticipating G.B.'s public appearances with the enthusiasm she once reserved for all-you-can-eat breakfast buffets. As her ardor and determination to gain G.B.'s affection grow, Rosemary embarks on an increasingly outrageous campaign that escalates from personal letters to paid advertising, until at last she reaches the White House. What happens next is nothing like how Rosemary imagined it would be. Written with razor-sharp satiric wit and packed with wry observations of our times, our presidents, and our electorate, George Bush, Dark Prince of Love is a hilarious antidote to the hype and hypocrisy of America's most hallowed institutions.

A Presidential Romance

George Bush, Dark Prince of Love

Suspecting his wife, Susan, is cheating on him with a younger coworker, Hal drunkenly volunteers to search for their missing boss who vanished in a tropical jungle in Belize, in this new novel from the author of How the Dead Dream. 13,000 first printing.

Ghost Lights: A Novel

How the Dead Dream

The author offers a pandora's box of astringent and sentimental confections through a collection of stories, each featuring that pairing that society seems to both love and loathe: celebrities and animals. By a PEN-USA award winner and an Arthur C. Clarke Prize finalist. Original.

Love in Infant Monkeys

A “supremely wacky [and] astute” novel by a PEN Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist (The Washington Post). In Los Angeles, Dean Decetes, a pornographer with messianic delusions, spins out of control, spending his time drinking himself into a stupor, getting beaten up by strangers he’s recklessly insulted, stealing credit cards to pay for sex, being arrested, begging favors, and mounting a PR campaign to make himself famous with the help of a loyal foot soldier—a porn-loving midget he met in jail. Meanwhile his pious, romantic spinster sister, who reluctantly keeps house for him, busies herself writing quasi-religious love notes to the boss she worships, and two of her coworkers at the statistics company—an obsessive-compulsive Christian Scientist in a twisted marriage and a promiscuous, depressed blond bombshell—become enmeshed in her life as she dreams of ridding herself of her freeloading brother and being carried away on a white horse by her employer. Then a teenage math genius runs away from home after her mother humiliates her in school, and hooks up at a bar with Decetes’s suicidal editor. Told from five points of view, over three wild days in which these lives intersect, this is a rollickingly funny yet heart-wrenching novel from one of today’s most acclaimed literary voices. “Taken at surface level, its presentation of over-the-top characters placed in bizarre situations is supremely wacky, but underneath is an astute examination of how contemporary society fosters alienation and loneliness so acute that it takes outsized actions to allow any possibility of driving the demons away.” —The Washington Post

Lydia Millet

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