W. W. Norton

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“

What the reader will not find in this, Millet’s eighth book: characters who are motivated by anything that might be usually considered proper novelistic motivation; a God who believes in justice, divine or otherwise; an ending that makes even a little bit of sense.

But the great thing about this novel is it makes the reader forget about the things he thinks he can’t live without in a novel.

”

From Brock Clarke’s review of Lydia Millet’s Ghost Lights

“Literature is hands down the sharpest tool in the shed for conveying the feeling of being lost in one’s own skin, one’s own life. Nervous breakdown, midlife crisis, amnesia: literature allows us to regard characters in the midst of these conditions from the inside and the outside. What was once familiar is now inaccessible, bizarre, even terrifying. Lydia Millet has prowled these corridors in all eight of her remarkable books, seven novels and a short story collection. Not only does she describe disorientation fully, she locates it squarely in modern American life as captured by David Byrne’s lyric: ‘This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife.’”

Susan Salter Reynolds in her review of Lydia Millet’s Ghost Lights

“Without warning she kissed him. Their bodies were touching all over, under the water and above it, solid and inflaming. Her nipples were against his chest. At once he was both frozen and pulsing with current. Even as it happened, and then continued to happen, it was impossible.
He would have to pay for this, he was thinking. And he would pay. He would pay. Gratefully.”

Lydia Millet, Ghost Lights
“Lydia Millet finds beautiful ways to wonder: Why? Not the why of psychological motivations, or how individuals respond to what’s happening to them; instead, she has a far more esoteric agenda. She’s trying to figure out why people die. What happiness is. Whether we need love. Whether we’re able to connect to something larger than this immediate life.” —BookForum reviews Ghost Lights

“Lydia Millet finds beautiful ways to wonder: Why? Not the why of psychological motivations, or how individuals respond to what’s happening to them; instead, she has a far more esoteric agenda. She’s trying to figure out why people die. What happiness is. Whether we need love. Whether we’re able to connect to something larger than this immediate life.”

—BookForum reviews Ghost Lights

First Lines from New Books Out Today: October 24, 2011

Rabbit #1: There is a land not far away from here where rabbit’s live in harmony with all other creatures.
Rabbit #2: That’s a complete load of shit and you know it.
What the Hell Are You Doing? The Essential David Shrigley by David Shrigley

“The walls were kittens and puppies.”
Ghost Lights: A Novel by Lydia Millet

“The child’s name is Melodie. Long ago, before Melodie was born, her pretty mother had had a stab at composing music.”
Trespass: A Novel by Rose Tremain

“Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719) contains one of the most famous acts of improvising a measure of all time. Crusoe had been shipwrecked on a deserted island for 15 years when, strolling on the beach, he was ‘thunder-struck’ to see ‘the print of a man’s naked foot’ in the sand. After having lived for years without encountering trace of another living human, Crusoe was ‘terrify’d to the last degree.’ He retreated to his cave, tormented for 3 days and nights by ‘wild ideas.’ Was it Satan’s own foot? Tracks of cannibals? Could it have been Crusoe’s own footprint, and his fears but delusions? He could think of only one way to go on: ‘I should go down to the shore again, and see this print of a foot, and measure it by my own.’ Returning to the beach, Crusoe set his foot alongside the print of the other. The footprint was larger than his—much larger. Thanks to that measurement, he was sure that the island had been visited by at least one person other than himself. This discovery transformed Crusoe’s notions about his own safety and prompted him to fortify his cave dwelling, which he henceforth thought of as his ‘castle.’”
World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement by Robert P. Crease

From the BookForum review of Ghost Lights:  “If literature can under the very best circumstances transport, then Millet’s extraordinary vision brings us in on the float. This is writing that endures…marks on the page that captivate and push and pull at the mind’s lazy habits. A landscape shift, a blast of faith—suffused with the ineffable, and an intrigue that feeds curiousity, which blossoms into hope.” In Stores 10/24

From the BookForum review of Ghost Lights: 

“If literature can under the very best circumstances transport, then Millet’s extraordinary vision brings us in on the float. This is writing that endures…marks on the page that captivate and push and pull at the mind’s lazy habits. A landscape shift, a blast of faith—suffused with the ineffable, and an intrigue that feeds curiousity, which blossoms into hope.”

In Stores 10/24

For Most of the Hours of Your Life…

“You passed like a dog through those empty houses, you passed through empty rooms…there was always the possibility of companionship but rarely the real event. For most of the hours of your life no one knew or observed you at all. You did what you thought you had to; you went on eating, sleeping, raising your voice at intruders out of a sense of duty. But all the while you were hoping, faithfully but with no evidence, that it turned out, in the end, you were a prince among men.”

—Lydia Millet, Ghost Lights