Love in Infant Monkeys
Lydia Millet
Soft Skull Press
<span>Animals  and celebrities share unusual relationships in these hilarious  satirical stories by an award-winning contemporary writer.</span><span><br><br>  Lions, Komodo dragons, dogs, monkeys, and pheasants—all have shared  spotlights and tabloid headlines with celebrities such as Sharon Stone,  Thomas Edison, and David Hasselhoff. Millet hilariously tweaks these  unholy communions to run a stake through the heart of our fascination  with famous people and pop culture in a wildly inventive collection of  stories that “evoke the spectrum of human feeling and also its limits” (</span><span>Publishers Weekly</span><span>, Starred Review).<br><br>  While in so much fiction animals exist as symbols of good and evil or  as author stand-ins, they represent nothing but themselves in Millet's  ruthlessly lucid prose. Implacable in their actions, the animals in  Millet’s spiraling fictional riffs and flounces show up their humans as  bloated with foolishness yet curiously vulnerable, as in a  tour-de-force, Kabbalah-infused interior monologue by Madonna after she  shoots a pheasant on her Scottish estate. Millet treads newly  imaginative territory with these charismatic tales.<br><br> “These  incredibly crafted stories, with their rare intelligence, humor, and  empathy, describe the furious collision of nature and science, man and  animal, everyday citizen and celebrity, fact and fiction. Lydia Millet’s  writing sparkles with urgent brilliance.” —Joe Meno</span>