Lions, Komodo dragons, dogs, monkeys, and pheasants - all have shared spotlights and tabloid headlines with celebrities such as Sharon Stone, Thomas Edison, and David Hasselhoff. Millet hilariously tweaks these unholy communions to run a stake through the heart of our fascination with famous people and pop culture.

While in so much fiction animals exist as symbols of good and evil or as author stand-ins, they represent nothing but themselves in Millet€s ruthlessly lucid prose. Implacable in their actions, the animals in Millet€s spiraling fictional riffs and flounces show up their humans as bloated with foolishness yet curiously vulnerable, as in a tour-de-force Kabbalah-infused interior monologue by Madonna after she shoots a pheasant on her Scottish estate. Millet treads newly imaginative territory with these charismatic tales.