Exclusive – How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet (chapter excerpt!)
Who hasn’t read Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, My Happy Life or Everyone’s Pretty? If you haven’t, you probably aren’t picking up the fiction of Lydia Millet. While that in itself is an unfortunate malady to any discerning reader, it is correctable and BookSpot Central is the first response!
Lydia Millet simply writes some of the most emotional and passionate fiction out there over the last few years – it has heart. Her fiction has a thoughtful, and appreciable complexity and I’m so proud we are able to present an excerpt of one of her books as she is a must read writer for me. Oh Pure and Radiant Heart was short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Everyone’s Pretty was the winner of the PEN-USA Award for Fiction in 2003. Today, BookSpot Central has the first chapter from her latest, How the Dead Dream, published early this year by Soft Skull Press.
Synopsis:
An only child in a typical middle-American family, T.’s first love is money, specifically the faces on the bills – Jackson, Hamilton, and Lincoln. As his peers go through teen crises, T accumulates, playing the responsible capitalist, setting up a successful real estate business.
But T’s material life begins to change as he adopts a dog, meets a girl, and takes his mother in after she splits up with his father. But when events conspire to leave T isolated again he starts to lose faith in people and civilisation and turns to nature instead, developing a strange and powerful obsession with endangered animals.
How the Dead Dream is a brilliant, moving satire about human loneliness and environmental loss, from one of America’s most exciting literary voices.
Ms. Millet has had a portion of this chapter available at her site but BookSpot Central has the chapter in its entirety.
I would like to thank Soft Skull Press and Lydia Millet for allowing us to present the following sampler.
Please check out all of our other exclusives for more chapters/excerpts from novels and complete short stories from collections and anthologies to sample! BookSpot Central is the choice for several publishers to bring you the goods!
I hope you enjoy!
