nomadreader

Waiting on Wednesday is hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine to highlight a non-yet-released book you cannot wait to read. My pick this week is the latest novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet: Ghost Lights . I first encountered Millet last year when I read the 2010 Pulitzer Prize winner and finalists. Despite not being a huge fan of short stories, I thoroughly enjoyed Love in Infant Monkeys  ( my review ) and several of the stories have stuck with me over the past year. When I heard Ms. Millet had a novel coming out in October, I was thrilled. Her writing is gorgeous, observant and hilarious, and I cannot wait to read Ghost Light . Here's how the publisher describes it: "Hal is a mild-mannered IRS bureaucrat who suspects that his wife is cheating with her younger, more virile coworker. At a drunken dinner party, Hal volunteers to fly to Belize in search of Susans employer, T.--the protagonist of Lydia Millet's much-lauded novel How the Dead Dream --...

The backstory: I haven't read anything by Lydia Millet before, but Love in Infant Monkeys was one of the finalists for this year's Pulitzer Prize. It is not available on the Kindle, so I requested it from the library. Because it's only a seven-day check out, I read it first. I am not a person who loves short stories, although Elizabeth Crane convinces me I sometimes do . I vaguely knew of Lydia Millet, as I remember wanting to read her novel George Bush, Dark Prince of Love when it came out. The basics & the verdict: Short story collections can be difficult to assess. There are always some stories more enjoyable than others. This collection works beautifully as a collection. All the stories deal with animals and celebrities, and each one is beautifully unique. Millet has taken tidbits and stories from the headlines and re-imagined them. The first story in the collection, "Sexing the Pheasant," is the story of Madonna hunting in England. It is absolute...