
Magnificence
Lydia Millet
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Description
This stunning new novel presents Susan Lindley, a woman adrift after her husband's death and the dissolution of her family. Embarking on a new phase in her life after inheriting her uncle's sprawling mansion and its vast collection of taxidermy, Susan decides to restore the neglected, moth-eaten animal mounts, tending to "the fur and feathers, the beaks, the bones and shimmering tails." Meanwhile an equally derelict human menagerie--including an unfaithful husband and a chorus of eccentric old women--joins her in residence.
In a setting both wondrous and absurd, Susan defends her legacy from freeloading relatives and explores the mansion's unknown spaces. Funny and heartbreaking, Magnificence explores evolution and extinction, children and parenthood, loss and revelation. The result is the rapturous final act to the critically acclaimed cycle of novels that began with How the Dead Dream.
Product Details
Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company |
Publish Date | November 11, 2013 |
Pages | 272 |
Language | English |
Type | |
EAN/UPC | 9780393346855 |
Dimensions | 8.3 X 5.5 X 0.7 inches | 0.5 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
...[W]arm, moving, funny, earnest, hopeful, honest, and engaged in a way at odds with current literary fashion...Millet's lush prose has you in her thrall from the start.--Jenny Hendrix "Boston Globe"
[Magnificence is] elegant, darkly comic...with overtones variously of Muriel Spark, Edward Gorey and J. G. Ballard, full of contemporary wit and devilish fateful turns for her characters, and then also to knit together into a tapestry of vast implication and ethical urgency, something as large as any writer could attempt: a kind of allegorical elegy for life on a dying planet. Ours, that is.--Jonathan Lethem "The Guardian"
[A] novel of ideas or philosophy, disguised as a portrait of one woman's midlife upheaval.--Laura Miller "Salon"
Millet is simply an incredible writer. Her prose displays the exceedingly rare combination of philosophical introspection with poetic grace and flourish.--Nicholas Mancusi "Daily Beast"
Millet's prose, which is both sensitive and strange... creates a thick atmosphere that immediately pulls the reader deep into this saga of love, death, sex, and taxidermy.-- "NewYorker.com"
Starred review. [An] elegant meditation on death and what it means to be alone, even you're not... A dazzling prose stylist, Millet elevates her story[, ] ...exploring grief and love as though they were animals to be stuffed, burrowing in deep and scooping out the innermost layers.-- "Publishers Weekly"
Starred review. [A] refreshingly buoyant and unsentimental tale...Millet's spare but powerful prose...calls to mind the work of J. M. Coetzee.--Jeff Ayres "Library Journal"
Starred review. Millet brings her searching, bitterly funny, ecologically attuned trilogy of Los Angeles-based novels (How the Dead Dream, 2008; Ghost Lights, 2011) to a haunting crescendo. ...Millet is extraordinarily agile and powerful here, moving from light to shadow like a stalking lioness....-- "Booklist"
There's much to explore in Magnificence, which is ambitious, often funny and deliciously provocative. One needn't have read the entire series to be consumed by its pleasures, but by the time you reach its beautiful end, considerable comfort lies in the existence of two more novels in which to delight in Millet's writing and imagination.--Christine Thomas "Miami Herald"
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