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    Love in Infant Monkeys: Stories
    Unavailable
    Love in Infant Monkeys: Stories
    Unavailable
    Love in Infant Monkeys: Stories
    Ebook147 pages3 hours

    Love in Infant Monkeys: Stories

    By Lydia Millet

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Animals and celebrities share unusual relationships in these hilarious satirical stories by an award-winning contemporary writer.
     
    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” (Publishers Weekly, Starred Review).
     
    While in so much fiction animals exist as symbols of good and evil or as author stand-ins, they represent nothing but themselves in Millets 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.
     
    “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
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateAug 27, 2009
    ISBN9781593763817
    Unavailable
    Love in Infant Monkeys: Stories
    Author

    Lydia Millet

    Lydia Millet is the PEN Award-winning author of eleven works of literary fiction, including Sweet Lamb of Heaven and Magnificence, which have been New York Times Notables and Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists. She lives in Arizona.

    Read more from Lydia Millet

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    Reviews for Love in Infant Monkeys

    3.5/5

    45 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A delightful, quirky, funny and smart collection of stories addressing pop cultural icons, animals and political leaders. The downfall: the collection's first story is far and away its strongest, which makes the ordering seem rather uneven. The first story is a must read for all, but short story lovers will enjoy the entire collection.
    • 3/5
      This collection of short stories has a peculiar mix of celebrities and animals. Some border on charming, such as Sexing the Pheasant (Madonna goes pheasant hunting and has a hilarious inner dialogue, complete with congratulating herself for using proper British slang) and The Lady and the Dragon (a Sharon Stone look-a-like is romanced with a Komodo dragon). Others, particularly the title story, Love in Infant Monkeys are disturbing and leave a bad taste in your mouth. So I guess I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it either. I don’t think I found as much humor in it as the author intended. It certainly was an interesting theme to build a collection around.
    • 3/5
      Love in Infant Monkeys is a Pulizer Prize shortlisted book of short stories by Lydia Millet. The stories are all very different, yet joined together by the conceit that each story features both an animal and a famous person, with the people ranging from Noam Chomskey (gerbils) and Jimmy Carter (rabbits, of course), to Madonna (pheasants) and a Sharon Stone impersonator (komodo dragons), to Nikola Tesla (pigeons) and Thomas Edison (an elephant). There is an odd, distanced feel to many of the stories, with several being narrated by a third party or presented as a historical report. The first story in the book, Sexing the Pheasant, was, for me, the weakest of the collection and had me mildly disliking the book for the first half, before Millet finally won me over. The title story benefitted the most from the distant narrative style; without it, the story would simply have been too much to bear reading. I'm left less that impressed with [[Lydia Millet]]'s writing, but when I first picked up this book someone told me that this is her weakest collection, so I'm inclined to try her again. The conceit of having each story be about someone famous and an animal is clever, but not clever enough to power an entire book. A few of the stories, such as Jimmy Carter's Rabbit, Love in Infant Monkeys and the final story in the book were very good.
    • 3/5
      A few of the stories were quite thought-provoking, but several were unreadable for me - mainly because of some of the cruel actions of humans towards animals. In her best stories, these actions subtly serve to highlight human frailty or weakness. However, in several of the stories, Millet uses the gimmick too obviously and loses the readers willingness to overlook the gruesome in favor of a message.I must have missed something, because I did not find the stories humorous as other readers have done. In fact, I felt pretty depressed coming away from this collection.
    • 4/5
      I loved this collection at first, but by the end it was beginning to feel a little samy. The best stories use the celebrity as a secondary character, instead of the main focus. I liked the Tesla story best. I could have totally done without the Sharon Stone story, which was irritating and too long.