Fight No More

by Lydia Millet

Overview

New York Times Book Review Editors’ Pick
A Library Journal Best Book of 2018

“Full of joys on every scale.” —NPR

This wonderfully original collection proves once again that Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet is “the American writer with the funniest, wisest grasp on how we fool ourselves” (Chicago Tribune). In Fight No More, Nina, a lonely real-estate broker estranged from her only relative, is at the center of a web of stories connecting a community through the houses they inhabit. With crackling satire and surprising tenderness, Millet introduces an indelible cast of untidy teens, beastly men, and strong-minded women whose stories begin to outline the fate of one particular family being torn apart by forces they recognize but cannot control. Millet’s intellect and beautiful prose deliver profound insight into human behavior, from the ordinary to the bizarre, and draws startling contrasts between house and home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393635492
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/12/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

This is Lydia Millet’s third story collection. Her first, Love in Infant Monkeys, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010; her second, Fight No More (2018), won an American Academy of Arts and Sciences short fiction award.

Editorial Reviews

"Home" is a word that can conjure feelings of safety and belonging. The very sound suggests a comfortable embrace; the exhale is almost a sigh of relief. But the canny and daring writer Lydia Millet is no sentimentalist, and in Fight No More, her new collection of linked stories, she explores the fragility and treachery of a place that can offer both solace and deception. Millet's boldly playful and intellectually charged body of work combines lightning bolts of emotional acuity, moments of precise poetry and subversively dark comedy along with investigations of existential ideas and real-world concerns. The ambitions of her latest are no less far-reaching…Life cannot be fully reckoned with, Millet suggests in this shimmering and brilliantly engaged collection, unless we embrace the fact that there is always a snake in even the most serene of gardens.

The New York Times Book Review - Marisa Silver

"Superb…The collection is linked through characters that reappear (as relatives, friends, lovers) as the book progresses, showing the ways in which we are living in simultaneous dimensions of pain, betrayal and forgetting. Yet as bleak as their situations may get, there remains a thread of dark humor."

|Los Angeles Times

"[Fight No More] is a novel about death disguised as a story collection about real estate, and it's alternately wrenching and hilarious, peaceful and joyful, so tender you almost can't bear it and so brutal you know that you can't."

NPR

"[A] shimmering and brilliantly engaged collection."

Marisa Silver

"Hilarious and fantastical…. [T]he most original short story collection I’ve read in years."

Bookworm on KCRW - Michael Silverblatt

"As Millet makes exceptionally potent use of the linked-stories form, her writing is razor-edged, her comedy at once caustic and compassionate, and her insights agile as she contrasts rich and poor, house and home, delusion and love. … [C]onfirms the evolution of this stellar author’s vital, caring, and audacious creativity and literary splendor."

Booklist (starred review)

"Millet’s great virtue is her negative capability. She inhabits the thoughts of the young and the elderly, of the fortunate and the bereaved, and of deviants and crackpots with equal candor and conversational ease."

Wall Street Journal

★ 03/01/2018
Showing a high-end California house to a man she assumes to be an African dictator, brisk, self-contained real estate agent Nina is shaken when the man plunges into the pool and must be revived by paramedics. She learns that he's actually a musician, with his presumed bodyguards his band members, and in the course of this wise and witty new collection—Millet's first since the Pulitzer Prize finalist Love in Infant Monkeys—she connects with one of the musicians, though her love is slammed by tragedy. Connection is the key throughout, as these stories interlock like the veins in a leaf. For instance, we keep meeting troubled teen Jem, who slyly disrupts Nina's showing of his divorced mother's house and gets abused teen Lexie, whom he's met via cybersex, a babysitting job with his father and stepmother. Jem grows over these pages, genuinely helping Lexie and his sharp-witted if ailing gram, no slouch herself. Meanwhile, Nina contends with a client who thinks she has dwarves in the attic. VERDICT Top-notch, in-your-face work from the priceless Millet. [See Prepub Alert, 12/11/17.]

Library Journal