Atavists
Stories
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
A Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2025 • One of NPR's "Books We Love" for 2025 • A Chicago Public Library Must-Read Book of 2025 • An Electric Literature Best Short Story Collection of 2025 • A Financial Times Best Summer Book of 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Pulitzer finalist Lydia Millet delivers a superb collection of short stories that are linked by interconnected characters and explore the idiosyncrasies of post-pandemic life. A predatory tech bro is on the market for new friends after humiliating the niece of one of his drinking buddies. A young woman with a shaky grasp on career goals discovers she has a gift for communicating with the elderly. A bartender at a gay gastropub becomes personally involved with his customers. And a retiree builds a tiny house for political refugees, who are less interested in his kindness than he is. Millet’s stories are often wickedly funny and sometimes genuinely moving, and her characters are well-drawn and recognizable, even at their most eccentric. It’s a lively account of life in the America of 2025 AD.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Millet (A Children's Bible) delivers a crystalline and mordantly funny linked story collection about a web of friends and neighbors in Southern California. In "Tourist," divorced mom Trudy gets her kicks by "courting her own disgust" via scrolling her phone for cringy updates from a former friend turned "wife guy." She also marvels at the disconnect between her friend Amy's curated online world (jet-skiing with the fam) and trouble at home, which Trudy discovers over drinks with Amy. "Fetishist" follows Amy's husband, Buzz, as he discovers geriatric porn in the family computer's browser history, which he deduces was viewed by his live-in son-in-law, Luis. He commits a "major tactical error" by telling Amy, who, instead of sharing a laugh with him as he'd expected, pressures him to confront Luis. In "Gerontologist," a recent high school graduate volunteers in a nursing home, where an elderly resident tells her about having sex with a fellow resident, who has dementia, on his "lucid days." Millet's cutting dialogue is as sharp as ever (Amy "needs to invest in some Spanx. Like, yesterday," claims a cruel friend of her daughter's in "Dramatist"), and the stories end with surprising and moving insights into her characters' deepest fears and desires. The author is at the top of her game.
