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2 Burnside Small Press- Fiction and Prose

Everyone's Pretty

by Lydia Millet

Everyone's Pretty Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Dean Decetes, a pornographer with messianic delusions, spins out of control in Los Angeles, where he spends his time drinking himself into a stupor, getting beaten up by strangers he's reckessly insulted, stealing credit cards to pay for sex, being arrested, begging favors, and mounting a PR campaign to make himself famous, with the help of a "loyal footsolider" — a porn-loving midget he met in jail. Meanwhile his pious, romantic spinster sister, who reluctantly keeps house for him, busies herself writing quasi-religious love notes to the boss she worships at the statistics company where she works, and her co-workers — an obsessive-compulsive Christian Scientist in a twisted marriage and a promiscuous, depressed blond bomb-shell — become enmeshed in her life as she dreams of ridding herself of her freeloading brother and being carried away on a white horse by her employer. Next door, a teenage math genius runs away from home after her mother humiliates her in school and hooks up at a bar with Decetes's suicidal editor.

The story is told from five points of view — those of Decetes, his sister, the lonely blonde, the Christian scientist & the high school math genius — over three days which the five lives collide as they all mount blundering searches for love and meaning.

Review:

"With a sharp eye for small details, a keen sense of the absurd and strong empathy for its creations, Everyone's Pretty is both prism and truth." Washington Post

Review:

"Lydia Millet's meandering tale of an alcoholic pornographer with a messianic complex is funny, dark and surprisingly tender in unexpected places....Pure poetry." Montreal Mirror

Review:

"...Everyone's Pretty is so transgressive, so wildly and beautifully dark, that it's like a breath of fresh air in a stale literary environment overrun with too-clever postmodernists." Tuscon Weekly

Review:

"The book impressively teeters on the edge of total inanity, each scene becoming increasingly uncomfortable, then unraveling out of control." Village Voice

Synopsis:

Written by the acclaimed author of My Happy Life and George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, Everyone's Pretty is a savagely funny novel about the search for God, sex, and significance.

When he's not drinking himself into a stupor, stealing credit cards to pay for sex, or plotting his fame with a horny midget, Los Angeles pornographer Dean Decetes entertains messianic delusions and freeloads wantonly from his spinster sister. Distancing herself from her deadbeat sibling, Bucella obsesses over the quasi-religious love notes she writes to her boss and reassures a coterie of codependent coworkers, including a hygiene-phobic Christian Scientist and a depressive blonde bombshell named Alice. Next door, a teenage math genius has endured humiliation at the hands of her mother and is running away from home. She hightails it to a local dive and hooks up with Dean's editor from the porno magazine.

Told from five hilariously bizarre points of view, this novel serves up a fabulously florid cast of characters, many inspired by author Lydia Millet's two-year stint working at Larry Flynt Publications.

About the Author

Lydia Millet lived in Los Angeles from 1991 to 1994, where she worked as a copy editor at Larry Flynt Publications (of Hustler fame) for two years. Subsequently she recieved a Master's in Environmental Policay at Duke University and now lives and writes full-time on an isolated spread in the desert near Tuscon, AZ.

Product Details

ISBN:
9781932360776
Author:
Millet, Lydia
Publisher:
Soft Skull Press
Subject:
Literary
Subject:
Brothers and sisters
Subject:
Single women
Subject:
FICTION / Literary
Publication Date:
January 2005
Binding:
Paperback
Language:
English
Pages:
200
Dimensions:
5.5" x 8.5"

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