Atavists: Stories

by Lydia Millet

Overview

A Financial Times Best Summer Book of 2025 • A Harper's Bazaar "Best Book Coming Out This Spring" Pick • One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025 • One of The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2025

A fast-moving, heartbreaking collection of short fiction from "the American writer with the funniest, wisest grasp on how we fool ourselves" (Chicago Tribune).

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324074427
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/22/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

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. She lives outside Tucson, Arizona.

Editorial Reviews

"A deliciously digestible and of-the-moment read."

Minneapolis Star Tribune - Marion Winik

"Very few writers can make the apocalypse hilarious and sentimental. Millet is the kind of contemporary genius who should be at every book festival and on every creative writing course."

The Scotsman - Stuart Kelly

"[Millet] knows how to put a story together. How to pace drama and consummate tension, when to turn up the volume and when to leave us alone with what she’s put in motion."

New York Times - Fiona Maazel

"Millet’s deftly told tales—in Atavists, as in her other novels and collections—demonstrate how a narrative framework creates meaning for human life…Stories are the sign. Atavists begs us to keep reading."

Los Angeles Times - Heather Scott Partington

"In this interconnected collection of short stories, Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet offers various slice-of-life vignettes that capture the alienation of modern life for families, couples, and communities. The characters that populate these stories feel utterly familiar, and the worlds they inhabit also reflect the chaos of our own, from reflections on post-pandemic life to the digital age."

Harper's Bazaar - Chelsea Sanchez

"Each story in this stellar collection comes with a label—therapist, artist, optimist—and a perspective from a linked cast of Los Angeles-area characters."

Christian Science Monitor

★ 2025-02-01
A group of characters in Los Angeles face climate crisis and existential angst in 14 interconnected short stories.

Two families stand at the center of Millet’s lovely, keening tales: Buzz, Amy, and their children Liza and Nick; and single mother Helen with daughters Mia and Shelley. They are well-educated, middle-class, liberal Americans, appalled by the state of their country and, in the case of the parents, bemused by their children. The younger generation “seemed to be void of ideology. Beyond naming and shaming each other for perceived identity bias,” comments Trudy, another character who turns up in several stories. This isn’t entirely true of Liza, who impulsively married a “DACA kid,” Luis, while still in high school, or Nick, a Stanford grad enraged by Americans’ complacency in the face of the “five-alarm emergency” of climate catastrophe and impending global extinction. “What we need,” he tells his therapist, “is a worldwide revolution. Yesterday.” Nonetheless, he’s stocking shelves in a big-box store and bartending in a gay bar, and his attitude of “what can I do?” is shared by most of Millet’s wonderfully human, believably flawed characters. A few creeps turn up—there’s one in “Pastoralist,” about a man who preys on vulnerable women, and another in “Cultist,” where Shelley’s smug boyfriend, Jake, spouts “pieces of pat received wisdom from business school” to her amused mother and the horrified Nick, who has become Mia’s boyfriend over the course of the stories. But generally, the author is gentle with confused, well-meaning people immobilized by the scope of the apocalypse they see looming. As she did in such novels asDinosaurs (2022) andA Children’s Bible (2020), Millet blends a blunt assessment of our refusal to deal with the ecological catastrophes we have created and a tender portrait of human beings with all their foibles.

Sharply observed, beautifully rendered, and heartbreaking.

Kirkus Reviews