April 24, 2025
The Center for Fiction is thrilled to have welcomed Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet to celebrate the release of her new collection of short fiction, Atavists. Millet was joined by long-time friend, novelist, and editor Jenny Offill (Dept. of Speculation).
Atavists follows families, couples, and loners alike as they navigate the trials and tribulations of contemporary middle-class America. From an underachieving young bartender to an empty-nester determined to host refugees in his backyard, Millet’s characters reveal the broad spectrum of heartbreak and joy we all experience in an age of overwhelm.
Watch a powerful conversation about human error, grand emotion, and innate urges of all kinds, skillfully compressed into the short story form.
Featured Book
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Atavists
By Lydia Millet
Published by W. W. Norton & Company
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.
Featuring
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Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet is the author of A Children’s Bible, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top Ten book of the Year. Her first work of short fiction, Love in Infant Monkeys, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010; her second, Fight No More (2018), won an American Academy of Arts and Sciences short fiction award. Atavists is her third work of short fiction. She lives outside Tucson, Arizona.
Photo Credit: Ivory Orchid Photography
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Jenny Offill
Jenny Offill
Jenny Offill is the author of the novel Last Things, which was chosen as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Book Award. She teaches in the writing programs at Queens University, Brooklyn College, and Columbia University.
