[Yale-readings] Novelist Lydia Millet reading, March 6, 12:30 p.m., LC 319

[Nancy Kuhl]

>The English Department presents a reading by acclaimed novelist Lydia 
>Millet, 12:30 p.m., Thursday, March 6, Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 63 High 
>Street, room 319.
>
>Lydia Millet is the author of six novels, most recently How the Dead Dream 
>(Counterpoint January 2008). Her fifth, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, was 
>shortlisted for Britain's Arthur C. Clarke Prize, and an earlier novel, My 
>Happy Life, won the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction. Also an essayist and 
>critic, Millet lives in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona, where she 
>works as a writer and editor at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity.
>
>She will be reading from her new novel, How the Dead Dream, the first book 
>in a trilogy, which introduces T., a young developer with a reverence for 
>money and the institutions of capital. Always restrained and solitary, he 
>has just fallen in love for the first time when his orderly, upwardly 
>mobile life is thrown into chaos by the appearance of his unbalanced 
>mother, who comes to live with him after his father's sudden desertion. In 
>the wake of a series of devastating losses, T. begins to nurture a curious 
>obsession with vanishing species, and is soon breaking into zoos at night 
>to be with animals that are the last of their kind.
>
>
>Review Excerpts
>
>"The writing is always flawlessly beautiful, reaching for an experience 
>that precedes language itself."
>
>-- Salon
>
>"It's hard, in fact, to convey how invigorating Millet's fiction is, how 
>intelligent and thematically rich, how processes of thought are themselves 
>made urgent and lively through the specificity of her observations and 
>sentences that offer startlement, small and large. This isn't fiction that 
>tells us how to live. Instead, it dramatizes the power of attentiveness to 
>an expanded, if terribly flawed and potentially dying, world, 
>attentiveness being a kind of tenderness, which is a kind of love."
>
>-- The Globe and Mail
>
>""How the Dead Dream" synthesizes the two styles of Millet's fiction -- 
>the harrowing and the madcap -- with a new elegance. The chapters are 
>longer, the narrative voice more coherent, and, as a result, the outrage 
>in her fiction achieves an unprecedented depth of focus."
>
>-- The San Francisco Chronicle
>
>"Wonderful secondary characters abound in this end-time novel, including 
>T.'s spacey mother, his over-the-top gay father, a saucy paraplegic 
>friend, a testosterone-driven egomaniac investor and fraternity brothers 
>straight off the set of "Animal House"...Millet sees the natural world 
>with clear-eyed urgency and the social landscape with wisecracking, dark 
>humor. How the Dead Dream is an edgy telegram on behalf of nature and its 
>singular beasts. As Millet writes: "The quiet mass disappearance, the 
>inversion of the Ark, was passing unnoticed." "
>
>-- Kansas City Star
>
>"How the Dead Dream focuses on the quiet existential crisis that arises 
>from living in a dying world... Yes, there's an argument for environmental 
>protection here, but what more profound is Millet's understanding of the 
>loneliness and alienation in a world being poisoned to death."
>-- Washington Post
>
>
>"Millet's got a visionary sensibility, marked by a voice that is by turns 
>biting and dark. Her books take on the absurdity of contemporary American 
>culture, poking at it from the outside in...Millet's sixth novel, How the 
>Dead Dream...may finally get her the attention she deserves."
>-- Los Angeles Times
>
>
>"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...her 
>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."
>-- Booklist (starred review)
>
>
>"A frightening and gorgeous vision of human decline."
>-- Utne Reader
>
>
>"Millet proves no less lyrical, haunting or deliciously absurd in her 
>brilliant sixth novel than in her fifth...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 review)
>
>
>"With wry, brilliant dialog and insightful existential musings, Millet 
>delves deep into the meaning of humanity's destructive connection to 
>nature and the consequences of the extinction of both animals and love. 
>Absorbing and not to be missed; highly recommended."
>-- Library Journal (starred review)
>
>
>"The reader's sympathy never flags...the suffering of a selfish, greedy 
>fortune-builder remains heartwrenching. The intelligent, sharp-humored 
>charm of her narrative voice aligns the reader with T. from the start. In 
>lyrical passages that trace T.'s deeper musings, Millet makes the personal 
>universal, raising the stakes so that each realization has the weight of a 
>revolution. And, like all revolutions, it's an untidy process, leaving the 
>future uncertain."
>-- BookPage
>
>
>"For a long time, Lydia Millet has had the makings of a great novelist. At 
>least two of her five previous books have hinted at how far her gifts 
>might take her, but her latest, How the Dead Dream, brings all her 
>strengths into an impressive balance...she has pulled off her funniest, 
>most shrewdly thoughtful and touching novel. If Kurt Vonnegut were still 
>alive, he would be extremely jealous."
>-- The Village Voice
>
>
>"What Millet has managed to do with How the Dead Dream and 2005's 
>wonderful atomic fable Oh Pure and Radiant Heart is to write fiction that 
>confronts social issues without falling into shrill hectoring or dull 
>didacticism...her steady hand and subtle voice are what make them work as 
>well as they do."
>-- The Believer
>
>
>"American culture loves its stories of hubris, downfall and ruin as of 
>late, but it takes a writer of Millet's sensitivity to enjoy the way down 
>this much."
>-- Eye Weekly
>
>
>
>
>
>Pericles Lewis
>
>Professor of English and Comparative Literature
>Director of Graduate Studies, Comparative Literature
>Yale University
>
>U.S. Mail: P. O. Box 208299, New Haven CT 06520-8299
>On-campus/Courier: 451 College St., Room 102
>Tel: (203) 432-2732, Fax: (203) 432-0136, email: pericles.lewis at yale.edu
>Website: https://webspace.yale.edu/pericleslewis/

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