Lydia Millet

A Financial Times Best Summer Book of 2025 • A Harper's Bazaar "Best Book Coming Out This Spring" Pick • One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025 • One of The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2025 A fast-moving, heartbreaking collection of short fiction from "the American writer with the funniest, wisest grasp on how we fool ourselves" (Chicago Tribune). The word atavism, coined by a botanist and popularized by a criminologist, refers to the resurfacing of a primitive evolutionary trait or urge in a modern being. This inventive collection from Lydia Millet offers overlapping tales of urges ranging from rage to jealousy to yearning—a fluent triumph of storytelling, rich in ideas and emotions both petty and grand. The titular atavists include an underachieving, bewildered young bartender; a middle-aged mother convinced her gentle son-in-law is fixated on geriatric porn; a bodybuilder with an incel’s fantasy life; an arrogant academic accused of plagiarism; and an empty-nester dad determined to host refugees in a tiny house in his backyard. As they pick away at the splitting seams in American culture, Millet’s characters shimmer with the sense of powerlessness we share in an era of mass overwhelm. A beautician in a waxing salon faces a sudden resurgence of grief in the midst of a bikini Brazilian; a couple sets up a camera to find out who’s been slipping homophobic letters into their mailbox; a jilted urban planner stalks a man she met on a dating app. In its rich warp and weft of humiliations and human error, Atavists returns to the trenchant, playful social commentary that made A Children’s Bible a runaway hit. In these stories sharp observations of middle-class mores and sanctimony give way to moments of raw exposure and longing: Atavists performs an uncanny fictional magic, full of revelation but also hilarious, unpretentious, and warm.

Stories

Atavists

like… wtf is this lmao. this quote is about a WHITE GIRL and there is no other race analysis within this story to warrant this weird ass paragraph? it’s just to say her hair stands out from a crowd? like be fr

markelle e. e.

Her hair was too recognizable. Where did you get that hair, her mother used to say. It wasn't white-person hair but kinky and springy and full. She had to use "ethnic" products to keep it under control. Even when she was in grade school. Her mother had always taken her to black beauty salons for her cuts. Because the white hairdressers didn't have a clue.

"It’s like you had an affair," her dad had joked to her mom. "With a guy who had an Afro.”

Her parents had both had flat, straight hair.

"Her hair is beautiful," her mother had said.

It was the tone of her mother's voice that she remembered most.

Atavists quotes

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