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Also by Lydia Millet:

Atavists, May 2025
Hardcover / e-Book
Dinosaurs, September 2023
Paperback / e-Book
Sweet Lamb of Heaven, May 2016
Hardcover
Pills And Starships, May 2014
Paperback / e-Book
Love In Infant Monkeys, October 2009
Paperback
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, June 2005
Hardcover

Atavists
Lydia Millet

Stories

W.W. Norton & Company
May 2025
On Sale: April 22, 2025
240 pages
ISBN: 1324074418
EAN: 9781324074410
Kindle: B0D8R3TYFW
Hardcover / e-Book
Add to Wish List

Novella / Short Story

A Harper's Bazaar "Best Book Coming Out This Spring" Pick
One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books 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.

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