10/08/2010 (1:30 pm)
Lydia Millet’s newest collection draws Pulitzer praise
What do Noam Chomsky, Jimmy Carter, Thomas Edison, ad Madonna have in common? They’re all protagonists (or at least central charactersour sympathy for them is sometimes in question) in Lydia Millet’s wondrous new collection, Love in Infant Monkeys. The title comes from the celebrities’ curious co-stars: a collection of animals ranging from hamster and rabbits to elephants and giraffes.The Pulitzer Committee praised Millet’s book for “underscoring the human folly of longing for significance while chasing trifles.” Millet has never been nominated before, but did win a PEN-USA Award for another novel of human folly: 2002′s My Happy Life. The narrator of this book is an unnamed woman trapped in an abandoned mental asylum, who writes her life story on her prison walls. [»]
