Lydia Millet on Long Extinct Creatures and Boundaries

With typically acute wit, Lydia Millet self-identifies on Twitter as an “American novelist interested in apocalyptic thought, extinction, climate change and other lighthearted matters.” Her literary career encompasses twelve inventive, genre-bending, sometimes absurdist novels (including A Children’s Bible, a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award, Magnificence, a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle award, and My Happy Life, winner of the 2003 PEN Center USA award for fiction), two story collections (Love in Infant Monkeys, which features weird animal stories about Madonna, Sharon Stone, and other celebrities, was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize), and three YA  books, with an occasional freestanding offering, like the short story  “Tylacine,” about the last Siberian tiger.