Oh [Im]pure and Radiant Millet
Kick ass profile on Lydia Millet (entitled "Oh Pure and Radiant Millet") by Louisa Ermelino in this week's Publishers Weekly. They've gotten much better about not hiding stuff behind the subscription barrier, which is deliciously nice.
Many choice items, I'll give ya two, one about her very first book, published by Algonquin in the mid 90's, and the other Ermelino's rather lovely description of How the Dead Dream her soon-to-be-latest.
“I started out working for a magazine called Fighting Knives, edited by a mercenary in South America, so when they offered me a slot at Hustler, I jumped to the porn side happily.” She sold her first book, Omnivores (Algonquin, 1996) during the two years at Hustler and says she learned a lot from the philosophy of the prisoners who made up a large part of the subscription base. And then there was her gun-running managing editor, a dwarf whose dominatrix visited once a month and destroyed the furniture in his office.
How the Dead Dreamis about the evolution of a young boy, T., obsessed with money—“His first idol was Andrew Jackson”—who becomes a wealthy real estate developer as an adult while ruminating on the big questions of identity, religion, death and nature. T. also experiences them: his father abandons the family to embrace his homosexuality and to work as a bartender in a transvestite bar in Key West, Fla., while his devoutly Catholic mother has a near-death experience and returns to tell T. that there's an IHOP on the other side with fluorescent lights and patrons “fat, pasty-faced, and dressed in loud prints,” not to mention that none of them were Catholics. T. takes to breaking into zoos, spending the night with the animals in their cages, finally setting out on a Conradian journey into the rain forest. The novel is pure Millet, dark, funny, brilliant, and a departure from all the others.
Oh and I can't resist a third which describes what happened when she turned in her second book:
Her editor at Algonquin was gone and his replacement called the book terrible, rude, inappropriate, filled with obscenities and without likable characters, notably the pornographer protagonist.
The second book was Everyone's Pretty, the manuscript languished unpublished for the best part of a decade, but it was that manuscript, touted to me by Josh Beckmann of Wave Books, that first turned me onto Lydia, and which we published before Oh Pure and Radiant Heart and re-issued My Happy Life.