Sarah Manguso & Lydia Millet: A Conversation

Lydia Millet is the author of 12 novels and two collections, including A Children’s Bible, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2020, among other works of fiction; and the collection Love in Infant Monkeys, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Dinosaurs (W. W. Norton & Company) is the story of a man named Gil who walks from New York to Arizona to recover from a failed love. After he arrives, new neighbors move into the glass-walled house next door, and his life begins to mesh with theirs. In this warmly textured, drily funny, and philosophical account of Gil’s unexpected devotion to the family, Millet explores the uncanny territory where the self ends, and community begins – what one person can do in a world beset by emergencies. In the shadow of existential threat, where does hope live?

Sarah Manguso is a fiction writer, essayist, and poet. Her nonfiction books include 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, The Guardians, and The Two Kinds Of Decay. Her work is regularly featured in The New York Times Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, and The New Yorker, among others. In Very Cold People: A Novel (Hogarth), Manguso writes about Ruthie, growing up in – and out of – the suffocating constraints of a very old and very cold small town. Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known. Once home to the country’s oldest and most illustrious families – the Cabots, the Lowells – by the tail end of the 20th century, it is an unforgiving place awash with secrets. Ruthie has been dogged by feelings of inadequacy her whole life. Hers is no picturesque New England childhood, but one of swap meets, factory seconds, and powdered milk. But as she grows older, she learns how the town’s prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history, and how silence often masks a legacy of harm. Waitsfield is a place to be survived, and a girl like her would be lucky to get out of it alive.