The Pandemonium Of The Sun

Lydia Millet is an author more people should be familiar with. Her latest book,Love in Infant Monkeys, is her first short story collection. When describing Millet to someone recently I said she was sort of a female George Saunders, which only partly does her justice. Her work is filled with dark humor and a startling range. Love In Infant Monkeys are stories about famous people and their relationships with the animal species. They veer back and forth between high and low culture. The book opens with a story about Madonna hunting pheasant and trying to be suitably British. There are also stories about David Hasselhoff’s dog walker and about Sharon Stone and the Komodo dragon that bit her then husband. Mixed with these are stories about Tesla and his pigeons, Edison and the elephant he had executed during his experiments with electric current, and Noam Chomsky at the town dump. Endlessly inventive, Millet is a joy to read.