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| T. is so devoted to earning money as a Los Angeles-based real-estate developer that he is content with his antiseptically solitary life until he is unmoored by a cascade of disasters. His mother loses her grip on reality after his fathers abrupt defection. T's luxury desert subdivision has hastened the demise of an endangered species, and when T. finally falls in love, she, too, is lost. T.'s grief blasts open the doors of perception, and he becomes cosmically attuned to the suffering of animals. Strategizing like a solo commando, he breaks into zoos in the dead of night to sit with the animals, many the last in their line. In a work just as startling, powerful, and significant as her brilliantly inventive Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005), Millet, a writer of encompassing empathy and imaginative lyricism, and a satirist of great wit and heart, takes readers on an intelligently conceived and devastating journey into the heart of extinction. Millets extraordinary leap of a novel warns us that as the splendor and mystery of the natural world is replaced by the human-made,our species faces a lonely and spiritually impoverished future. —Donna Seaman, Booklist starred |
| Millet proves no less lyrical, haunting or deliciously absurd in her brilliant sixth novel than in her fifth, the acclaimed Oh Pure & Radiant Heart. As a boy, T. keeps his distance from others, including his loving but vacant parents, preferring to explore his knack for turning a dollar. Before long, he's a wealthy but lonely young real estate developer in L.A. Just after he adopts, on impulse, a dog from the pound, his mother shows up and announces that T.'s father has left her. His mother, increasingly erratic, moves in; meanwhile, T. finally meets and falls in love with Beth, a nice girl who understands him, but a cruel twist of fate soon leaves him alone again. As his mother continues to unravel, T. finds unexpected consolation in endangered animals at the zoo, and he starts breaking into pens after hours to be closer to them. The jungle quest that results, while redolent of Heart of Darkness and Don Quixote, takes readers to a place entirely Millet's own, leavened by very funny asides. At once an involving character study and a stunning meditation on loss – planetary and otherwise – Millet's latest unfolds like a beautiful, disturbing dream —Publishers Weekly starred |
Praise for Lydia Millet's Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
"[B]rilliant and fearless...a shattering and beautiful work."—Entertainment Weekly |
Praise for Lydia Millet's My Happy Life
"Occasionally a book comes along that is truly written (as writers are instructed books should be) as if it were the writer's last: Millet's sad and infinitely touching third novel...is such an extraordinary work."—Publisher's Weekly (starred review) | |
How the Dead Dream
Lydia Millet
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| Cloth | 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 | 256 pgs. | ISBN: 1-59376-184-8 | List: $24.00 | 01/1/2008 |
Available on Powells.com, Amazon.com, from your local BookSense store, and bookstores everywhere!
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About the book: Devoted to money and to ideas of power and political ambition, entrepreneur and former frat boy T. wants to establish himself in real estate in Los Angeles, having spent his life to that point developing his childhood predeliction for charity scams into a highly profitable day-trading regime.
His schemes, funded by both his own capital and that of a collection of rich, bored ignorant men whom he cultivates for their wealth, are interrupted by the unexpected appearance of his wretched mother, who comes to live in his bachelor apartment when his father, her husband of thirty years, suddenly disappears. Fragile and half-crazy, she wreaks havoc with his orderly and upwardly mobile life and new girlfriend. Deciding to find his vanished father to demand he talk to T.'s mother, he discovers his father has left the closet and is working a cocktail lounge in Key West.
In the wake of his mother's suicide attempt and two other deaths, he finds himself increasingly estranged from the professional world he's chosen. When his largest project, a retirement development in the middle of the desert and as he juggles his family and social responsibilities T. begins to nurture a curious obsession with vanishing species, whose pending extinction he studies. Soon he's living a double life, building sprawling, generic subdivisions in the California desert by day and breaking into zoos at night to be near the animals. When the loss of his closest friend and his mother's dementia leave him isolated he flees to a tropical island, where in the wake of a devastating hurricane he decides to take a river trip into the remote jungle.
Millet's coruscating wit, psychological acuity, and linguistic acumen are here deployed to thrilling effect as her remarkable empathy for flawed humankind contends with her vision of a world slowly murdering itself, producing Millet's most knife-edged work yet.
How the Dead Dream is the first book of a trilogy.
About the author: Born in Boston in 1968, Lydia Millet moved to Toronto, Canada with her Egyptologist father and teacher/librarian mother two years later. She received a Master's in Environmental Policy at Duke University and moved to New York in 1996, where she worked as a fundraiser for the Natural Resources Defense Council. In 1999 she went freelance and moved to Tucson, where she now lives and writes full-time on an isolated spread in the desert. She is the author of Omnivores (Algonquin, 1996), George Bush, Dark Prince of Love (Scribner, 2000), My Happy Life (Henry Holt, 2002; Soft Skull Press 2007), a winner of the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction, Everyone's Pretty (Soft Skull Press, 2005) and Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (Soft Skull, 2005)
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