Fight No More: Stories - Hardcover

Lydia Millet is the PEN Award-winning author of eleven works of literary fiction, including Sweet Lamb of Heaven and Magnificence, which have been New York Times Notable Books and Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists. She lives in Arizona.

“[A] shimmering and brilliantly engaged collection.”
- Marisa Silver, New York Times Book 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. She’s also funny. ... But the temptation of cynicism never gets the best of this fine book.”
- Wall Street Journal

“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

“Is there a writer more profound and less pretentious than Lydia Millet? In her novels and story collections, a dozen in all, Millet deals out existential questions like playing cards, and like any good casino dealer, her hands never shake. Her newest book, Fight No More, could easily be her most philosophically confident and complex work yet. It's 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

“[Millet is] one of the funniest writers of American fiction ... She’s ferociously untame ― free with the use of non-realist devices like time travel or mermaids ― but also not immune to the pleasing strokes of the 19th-century novel, like romances across class lines or sudden inheritances. She takes on big political themes like environmental despoliation, structural inequality, and the bomb. Critics have noticed this all along, and if Millet isn’t as famous as she deserves to be, it’s only a matter of time. ... You have the sense that Millet could easily bury us in her smartness but has instead cleaved to the characters she’s created and made her humor generously broad.”
- Christian Lorentzen, New York Magazine

“The tales’ intersections are as intricate as L.A.’s freeways―but, unlike the 405 at rush hour, totally delightful.”
- O Magazine

“Irresistible ... a sprawling, tender portrait of modern adults quietly trapped by their youthful aspirations.”
- Publishers Weekly

“Millet so readily shifts point of view―by turns she can be a snotty rich kid, a pedophile, and a lower-class cam girl striving to rise above her station. ... A linked-story collection done right, with sensitive and complex characters each looking for a place to call home.”
- Kirkus (starred review)

“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)

“Hilarious and fantastical.... [T]he most original short story collection I’ve read in years.”
- Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm