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

Winner of the Mark Twain House & Museum's 2026 American Voice in Literature Award
Finalist for the 2025 Story Prize

A Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2025 • One of NPR's "Books We Love" for 2025 • A Chicago Public Library Must-Read Book of 2025 • An Electric Literature Best Short Story Collection of 2025

"Very few writers can make the apocalypse hilarious and sentimental." —Stuart Kelly, Scotsman
 
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.
 
Contributor Bio(s)

 
Lydia Millet is the author of more than twenty books, including A Children's Bible, a finalist for the National Book Award and one of the New York Times "10 Best Books" of the year in 2020, and a story collection called Love in Infant Monkeys that was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Other books have won awards from PEN-Center USA and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Millet works at the Center for Biological Diversity and lives outside Tucson, Arizona.