Reviews
"Millet works a kind of spell... You could read this collection as a critique—of our celebrity culture, of the uses we make of unresponding creatures—and Millet is sufficiently thorough to layer these resonances in a satisfying way."
—The New York Times Book Review
"Millet’s stories evoke the spectrum of human feeling and also its limits."
—Publishers Weekly (*Starred Review*)
"In all these stories, animals are the victims of human projection, not always passive but still recipients of our struggle to understand death, faith, and the divine."
—Kathryn Harrison, Bookforum
"Brilliant and audacious Millet archly plucks famous people out of history books and the tabloids and places them at the nucleus of acerbic yet elegiac tales about stark encounters with other species."
—Booklist (*Starred Review*)
"Ranging from the mundane to the surreal, Millet's satirical yet sometimes touching stories will appeal to fans of the author's previous novels, especially Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, and to fans of T.C. Boyle's fictionalizations of well-known figures."
—Library Journal
"Love in Infant Monkeys is the most thought provoking short story collection since Judy Budnitz’s Flying Leap... In seamless prose beset with wit and an overzealous imagination, Lydia Millet has turned out a collection of great wonder and sadness."
—Venus Zine
"Millet turns these stories into poetry, giving the animals a greater voice than either man... In Love in Infant Monkeys, these unconventional stories prove themselves to be art. Millet transcends her own voice by taking on unconventional characters, both warm and cold blooded. The result, to say the least, is uniquely moving."
—Bomb Magazine
"Millet is one of the loosest writers I know, by which I mean that her work takes rare risks with subject matter and form, and does so with a sense of jazzy improvisation... intensely pleasurable to read."
—TheRumpus.net
"These incredibly-crafted stories, with their rare intelligence, humor, and empathy, describe the furious collision of nature and science, man and animal, everyday citizen and celebrity, fact and fiction. Lydia Millet’s writing sparkles with urgent brilliance."
—Joe Meno, author of Hairstyles of the Damned
"Absolutely beautiful stories. Perfect, in their own way, just like the animals they describe. The title piece—‘Love in Infant Monkeys,’ about the infamous experimental psychologist Harry Harlow—moved me to tears."
—Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of When Elephants Weep
and The Face on Your Plate
