Audiobooks by Lydia Millet

"A fast-moving, heartbreaking collection of linked stories that evokes the joy and alienation between generations and classes in the era of mass overwhelm. From Lydia Millet—“the American writer with the funniest, wisest grasp on how we fool ourselves” (Chicago Tribune)—comes an inventive new collection of short fiction. Atavists follows a group of families, couples, and loners in their collisions, confessions, and conflicts in a post-pandemic America of artificially lush lawns, beauty salons, tech-bro mansions, assisted-living facilities, big-box stores, gastropubs, college campuses, and medieval role-playing festivals. The various “-ists” who people these linked stories—from futurists to insurrectionists to cosmetologists—include a professor who’s morbidly fixated on an old friend’s Instagram account; a woman convinced that her bright young son-in-law is watching geriatric porn; a bodybuilder who lives an incel’s fantasy life; a couple who surveil the neighbors after finding obscene notes in their mailbox; a pretentious academic accused of plagiarism; and a suburban ex-marathoner dad obsessed with hosting refugees in a tiny house in his backyard."

Lydia Millet (Author), Devon Sorvari, Hillary Huber, Patrick Zeller, Pete Cross (Narrator)

Audiobook

We Loved It All: A Memory of Life

"Acclaimed novelist Lydia Millet’s first work of nonfiction is a genre-defying tour de force that makes an impassioned argument for people to see their emotional and spiritual lives as infinitely dependent on the lives of nonhuman beings. Drawing on a quarter-century of experience as an advocate for endangered species at the Center for Biological Diversity, Millet offers intimate portraits of what she calls “the others”—the extraordinary animals with whom we still share the world, along with those already lost. Humans, too, fill this book, as Millet touches on the lives of her world-traveling parents, fascinating partners and friends, and colorful relatives, from diplomats to nut farmers—all figures in the complex tapestry each of us weaves with the surrounding world. Written in the tradition of Annie Dillard or Robert Macfarlane, We Loved It All is an incantatory work that will appeal to anyone concerned about the future of life on earth—including our own."

Lydia Millet (Author), Xe Sands (Narrator)

Audiobook

Dinosaurs

"'Over twelve novels and two collections, Lydia Millet has emerged as a major American novelist, writing vividly about the ties between people and other animals and the crisis of extinction. Her exquisite new novel, the first since A Children’s Bible, tells the story of an Arizona man’s relationship with the family next door, whose house has one wall made entirely out of glass. The story delivers attraction and love, friendship and grief. But Millet also evokes the uncanny. Through close observation of human and animal life in the desert, she captures the daunting scale of human society without losing sight of the real difference one person can make in the world. Written with humor and benevolence, Dinosaurs asks big questions: Can a person be good? Can a man be good? Compellingly told, emotionally moving, and intellectually rich, Dinosaurs may be Millet’s finest novel yet.'"

Lydia Millet (Author), Paul Heitsch (Narrator)

Audiobook

Love in Infant Monkeys

"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. In this critically acclaimed collection, Lydia Millet hilariously tweaks these unholy communions to run a stake through the heart of our fascination with famous people and pop culture in wildly inventive 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 Millet's 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."

Lydia Millet (Author), Cady Zuckerman, Hillary Huber, Michael Brusasco, Pete Cross (Narrator)

Audiobook

How the Dead Dream

"As a wealthy, young real-estate developer in Los Angeles, T. lives an isolated life. He has always kept his distance from people—from his doting mother to his crass fraternity brothers—but remains unaware of his loneliness until one night, while driving to Las Vegas, he hits a coyote on the highway. The experience unnerves him and inspires a transformation that leads him to question his business pursuits for the first time in his life, to take a chance at falling in love, and to begin breaking into zoos across the country, where he finds solace in the presence of animals on the brink of extinction. A beautiful, heart-wrenching tale, How the Dead Dream is also a riveting commentary on individualism and community in the modern social landscape and how the lives of people and animals are deeply entwined. Judged by many—including the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post Book World—to be Lydia Millet's best work to date, it is, as Time Out New York perfectly states, This beautiful writer's most ambitious novel yet, a captivating balancing act between full-bodied satire and bighearted insight."

Lydia Millet (Author), Michael Brusasco (Narrator)

Audiobook

Everyone's Pretty

"In Los Angeles, Dean Decetes, a pornographer with messianic delusions, spins out of control, spending his time drinking himself into a stupor, getting beaten up by strangers he’s recklessly insulted, stealing credit cards to pay for sex, being arrested, begging favors, and mounting a PR campaign to make himself famous with the help of a loyal foot soldier—a porn-loving midget he met in jail. Meanwhile his pious, romantic spinster sister, who reluctantly keeps house for him, busies herself writing quasi-religious love notes to the boss she worships, and two of her coworkers at the statistics company—an obsessive-compulsive Christian Scientist in a twisted marriage and a promiscuous, depressed blonde bombshell—become enmeshed in her life as she dreams of ridding herself of her freeloading brother and being carried away on a white horse by her employer. Then a teenage math genius runs away from home after her mother humiliates her in school and hooks up at a bar with Decetes’s suicidal editor. Told from five points of view, this novel takes place over the three wild days in which these lives intersect."

Lydia Millet (Author), Cady Zuckerman (Narrator)

Audiobook

My Happy Life

"At the opening of My Happy Life, the unnamed narrator of this bittersweet fictional memoir has been abandoned in a locked room of a defunct hospital for the mentally ill. She hasn't seen the nice man who brings her food in days; she's eaten the soap and the toothpaste; she tried to eat the plaster on her walls, a dietary adventure that ended none too well. And yet, curiously, the narrator is happy. Despite a lifetime of neglect, physical abuse, and loss, she's incapable of perceiving slight or injury. She has infinite faith in the goodwill of others, loves even her enemies, and finds grace and communion in places most people wouldn't dare to look. By stepping outside her meager circumstances, she's able to live each moment as though it were her last—with gratitude, longing, and delight. Lauded by both critics and listeners, My Happy Life consistently surprises and excites with its original vision of a unique woman whose rich interior life protects her from the horrors of external reality."

Lydia Millet (Author), Julia Whelan (Narrator)

Audiobook

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

"The three dead geniuses who invented the atomic bomb— Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and Enrico Fermi—mysteriously appear in Sante Fe, New Mexico, in 2003, nearly sixty years after they watched history's first mushroom cloud rise over the New Mexico desert. One by one, they are discovered by a shy librarian, who takes them in and devotes herself to them. Faced with the evidence of their nuclear legacy, the scientists embark on a global disarmament campaign that takes them from Hiroshima to Nevada to the United Nations. Along the way, they acquire a billionaire pothead benefactor and a growing convoy of RVs carrying groupies, drifters, activists, former Deadheads, New Age freeloaders, and religious fanatics. In this heroically mischievous, sweeping tour de force, Lydia Millet brings us an apocalyptic fable that marries the personal to the political, confronts the longing for immortality with the desire for redemption, and evokes both the beauty and tragedy of the nuclear sublime."

Lydia Millet (Author), Hillary Huber (Narrator)

Audiobook

A Children's Bible

"Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet’s sublime new novel—her first since the National Book Award long-listed Sweet Lamb of Heaven—follows a group of twelve eerily mature children on a forced vacation with their families at a sprawling lakeside mansion. Contemptuous of their parents, who pass their days in a stupor of liquor, drugs, and sex, the children feel neglected and suffocated at the same time. When a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, the group’s ringleaders—including Eve, who narrates the story—decide to run away, leading the younger ones on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside. As the scenes of devastation begin to mimic events in the dog-eared picture Bible carried around by her beloved little brother, Eve devotes herself to keeping him safe from harm. A Children’s Bible is a prophetic, heartbreaking story of generational divide—and a haunting vision of what awaits us on the far side of Revelation."

Lydia Millet (Author), Xe Sands (Narrator)

Audiobook

Pills and Starships

"Publisher Marketing: 'Fascinating and thought provoking! 'Pills and Starships' is a chilling look at an ecologically damaged future where big business and the government have not only seized control of the surviving population through drugs, but have taken charge of death itself. Lydia Millet has raised questions that will resonate with readers for years to come.' --Joelle Charbonneau, author of 'The Testing' 'One of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation.' --'Los Angeles Times' In this richly imagined dystopic future brought by global warming, mass human migrations are constant, water and food are scarce, new babies are illegal, and the disintegrating society is run by corporates who feed the people a steady diet of 'pharma' to keep them happy. Usually, seventeen-year-old Nat doesn't let it get her down too much: this, after all, is the life she's used to; and though she is nostalgic for the ancient world she's heard about, she's also realistic, cheerful, and tough. But now her family--her parents and her hacker brother Sam--have come by ship to the Big Island of Hawaii for their parents' Final Week. The few Americans who still live well also live long--so long that older adults bow out not by natural means but by buying death contracts. Nat's family is spending their pharma-guided last week at a luxury resort complex called the Twilight Island Acropolis, where their parents have bought a 'vacation contract.' Counting down the days till her parents are scheduled to die, Nat keeps a record of everything her family does in the company-supplied diary that came in the hotel's care package. When Sam rebels against the corporates his parents have hired to handle their last days, Nat has to choose a side. Does she let her parents go gently into that good night, or does she turn against the system and try to break them out? This page-turning first YA novel by critically acclaimed author Lydia Millet is stylish and dark and yet deeply hopeful, bringing Millet's characteristic humor and style to a new generation of young readers. Biographical Note: Lydia Millet is the author of seven novels for adults as well as a story collection called 'Love in Infant Monkeys' (2009), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her first book for middle-grade readers, 'The Fires Beneath the Sea,' was one of 'Kirkus'' Best Children's Books of 2011, as well as a Junior Library Guild selection. Millet works as an editor and writer at a nonprofit in Tucson, Arizona, where she lives with her two young children."

Lydia Millet (Author), Mozhan Marno (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks by Lydia Millet

Join Our Community