Lydia Millet

Lydia Millet (born 5 December 1968) is an American novelist. Her third novel, "My Happy Life", won the 2003 PEN-USA Award for Fiction. Her fifth novel, "Oh Pure and Radiant Heart" has been short-listed for the 2007 Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Life and works

Millet was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Toronto, Canada. She holds a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master's degree from Duke University.

Millet is best known for her dark sense of humor, stylistic versatility, and political bent. Her first book, "Omnivores" (1996), is a subversion of the coming-of-age novel, in which a young girl in Southern California is tormented by her megalomaniac father and invalid mother and finally sold in marriage to a real estate agent. Her second, "George Bush, Dark Prince of Love" (2000), is a political comedy about a trailer-park woman obsessed with the 41st American President; her third, "My Happy Life" (2002), is a poetic, language-oriented work about a lonely misfit trapped in an abandoned hospital, who writes the poignant story of her life on the walls.

Millet's fourth novel, "Everyone's Pretty" (2005), is a picaresque tragicomedy about an alcoholic pornographer with messianic delusions, based partly on Millet's stint as a copy editor at Larry Flynt Publications. Her fifth novel, "Oh Pure and Radiant Heart" (2005), brings three of the physicists responsible for creating the atomic bomb to life in modern-day New Mexico, where they acquire a cult following and embark on a crusade for redemption. Her latest novel "How the Dead Dream" (2008) is a black comedy about a young Los Angeles real estate developer consumed by power and political ambitions who, after his mother's suicide attempt and two other deaths, begins to nurture a curious obsession withvanishing species. Then a series of calamities forces him from a tropical island, the site onone of his developments, onto the mainland where he takes a Conrad-esque journey up a river into the remote jungle.

Bibliography

*"Omnivores" (1996)
*"George Bush: Dark Prince of Love" (2000)
*"My Happy Life" (2002)
*"Everyone's Pretty" (2005)
*"Oh Pure and Radiant Heart" (2005)
*"How the Dead Dream" (2008)

External links

* [http://www.lydiamillet.net/index.html Author site]
* [http://www.harpercollins.ca/global_scripts/product_catalog/author_xml.asp?authorid=CA59993 HarperCollins Canada]
* [http://www.harpercollins.ca/trailers/trailer0006395546.html Video trailer] for "Oh Pure and Radiant Heart"