"In Lydia Millet’s collection, Love in Infant Monkeys, the author sets herself a Chinese finger trap of a constraint—what if every story in a collection were built around a different celebrity/animal relationship?" writes acclaimed author Karen Russell in her introduction to this issue of Recommended Reading. "Let’s speak frankly: this absolutely shouldn’t function. Millet’s straitjacket of a conceit makes those Oulipo dudes look like a bunch of slackers in muumuus. But Millet takes her own dare and she delivers, producing a slender masterpiece about humans’ engagement with and estrangement from the natural world. Love in Infant Monkeys collects ten stories, ten acts of sustained improvisatory brilliance. I first read the collection in 2009 and I loved every one. I admired the success of Millet’s interspecies matchmaking, her instinct for pairing certain outsized human personalities with bizarrely proportioned creatures: David Hasselhoff and a dacshund. Sharon Stone and a Komodo dragon. Every story is audacious, tragic, hilarious, and surprising, but the one I find myself returning to again and again is 'Girl and Giraffe.'"
About the Author:
Lydia Millet won the PEN-USA award for fiction for her early novel My Happy Life (2002); in 2010, her story collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2008, 2011, and 2012 she published three novels in a critically acclaimed series about extinction and personal loss: How the Dead Dream, Ghost Lights, and Magnificence. June 2014 will see the publication of her first book for young-adult readers, Pills and Starships—an apocalyptic tale of death contracts and climate change set in the ruins of Hawaii.
About the Guest Editor:
Karen Russell, a native of Miami, has been featured in The New Yorker’s debut fiction issue and on The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list, and was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young Novelists. Her story "The Hox River Window" won the 2012 National Magazine Award. Her first novel, Swamplandia!, was a New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year selection, and winner of the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. She is a graduate of the Columbia MFA program, a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. Her novella, Sleep Donation, is forthcoming from Atavist Books in 2014.
About the Publisher:
Electric Literature is an independent publisher working to ensure that literature remains a vibrant presence in popular culture. Electric Literature’s weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, invites established authors, indie presses, and literary magazines to recommended great fiction. Once a month we feature our own recommendation of original, previously unpublished fiction, accompanied by a Single Sentence Animation. Single Sentence Animations are creative collaborations: the author chooses a favorite sentence and we commission an artist to interpret it. Stay connected with us through email, Facebook, and Twitter, and find previous Electric Literature picks in the Recommended Reading archives.
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