Emerging from Lydia Millet’s quarter-century of wildlife and climate advocacy, WE LOVED IT ALL marries scenes from her life with moments of nearness to “the others”--- the animals and plants with whom we share the earth. Accounts of fears and failures, jobs and friendships, childhood and motherhood are interspersed with accounts of nonhumans and meditations on the power of story to shape the future. Seeking to understand why we immerse ourselves in the domestic and immediate, turning away from more sweeping views, she examines how grand cultural myths can deny our longing for the company of nature and deprive us of its charisma and inspiration. The fear and grief of extinction and climate change, Millet suggests, are forms of love that might be turned to resistance.

The word atavism, coined by a botanist and popularized by a criminologist, refers to the resurfacing of a primitive evolutionary trait or urge in a modern being. This inventive collection from Lydia Millet offers overlapping tales of urges ranging from rage to jealousy to yearning --- a fluent triumph of storytelling, rich in ideas and emotions both petty and grand. As they pick away at the splitting seams in American culture, Millet’s characters shimmer with the sense of powerlessness we share in an era of mass overwhelm. In these stories sharp observations of middle-class mores and sanctimony give way to moments of raw exposure and longing: ATAVISTS performs an uncanny fictional magic, full of revelation but also hilarious, unpretentious and warm.

DINOSAURS 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, dryly funny and philosophical account of Gil’s unexpected devotion to the family, Lydia Millet explores the uncanny territory where the self ends and community begins --- what one person can do in a world beset by emergencies.

A CHILDREN’S BIBLE follows a group of 12 eerily mature children on a forced vacation with their families at a sprawling lakeside mansion. Contemptuous of their parents, who pass their days in a stupor of liquor, drugs and sex, the children feel neglected and suffocated at the same time. When a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, the group’s ringleaders --- including Eve, who narrates the story --- decide to run away, leading the younger ones on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside. As the scenes of devastation begin to mimic events in the dog-eared picture Bible carried around by her beloved little brother, Eve devotes herself to keeping him safe from harm.

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, Lydia 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.

SWEET LAMB OF HEAVEN is the first-person account of a young mother, Anna, escaping her cold and unfaithful husband, a businessman who has just launched his first campaign for political office. When Ned chases Anna and their six-year-old daughter from Alaska to Maine, the two go into hiding in a run-down motel on the coast. But the longer they stay, the less the guests in the dingy motel look like typical tourists --- and the less Ned resembles a typical candidate. As his pursuit of Anna and their child moves from threatening to criminal, Ned begins to alter his wife’s world in ways she never could have imagined.

On the grounds of a Caribbean island resort, newlyweds Deb and Chip meet a marine biologist who says she has sighted mermaids in a coral reef. As the resort's "parent company" swoops in to corner the market on mythological creatures, the couple joins forces with other adventurous souls to save said mermaids from the "Venture of Marvels," which wants to turn their reef into a theme park.

Susan Lindley is a woman adrift after her husband’s death. Suddenly gifted her great uncle’s Pasadena mansion, Susan decides to restore his extensive collection of preserved animals, tending to “the fur and feathers, the beaks, the bones and shimmering tails.” Meanwhile, a menagerie of uniquely damaged humans --- including a cheating husband and a chorus of eccentric elderly women --- joins her in residence.

Hal, a man baffled by his wife's obsession with her young employer, T., and haunted by the accident that paralyzed his daughter, Casey. In a moment of drunken heroism, Hal embarks on a quest to find T.