Writers at the Wrecking Bar Presents Lydia Millet in conversation with Lauren K. Watel - Atavists and Book of Potions
Wednesday, Apr 23, 2025 7:00 PM
Location:
The Marianna Room at the Wrecking Bar Brewpub
292 Moreland Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia 30307
At the April edition of Writers at the Wrecking Bar, A Cappella Books welcomes National Book Award finalist and New York Times Top Ten author of “A Children’s Bible,” Lydia Millet to celebrate the release of her latest book, “Atavists: Stories.” The author will appear in conversation with Lauren K. Watel, award-winning poet and author of “Book of Potions.”
This event is free and open to the public. A Cappella Books will have copies of “Atavists” and “Book of Potions” available for purchase at the event.
About Atavists
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.
The titular atavists include an underachieving, bewildered young bartender; a middle-aged mother convinced her gentle son-in-law is fixated on geriatric porn; a bodybuilder with an incel’s fantasy life; an arrogant academic accused of plagiarism; and an empty-nester dad determined to host refugees in a tiny house in his backyard.
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. A beautician in a waxing salon faces a sudden resurgence of grief in the midst of a bikini Brazilian; a couple sets up a camera to find out who’s been slipping homophobic letters into their mailbox; a jilted urban planner stalks a man she met on a dating app.
In its rich warp and weft of humiliations and human error, “Atavists” performs an uncanny fictional magic—full of revelation but also hilarious, unpretentious, and warm.
About Book of Potions
Written with tremendous urgency and ferocious candor, the prose poems of Book of Potions capture a woman caught in the middle of life: no longer young, not yet old, trapped between generations, locked in stereotyped roles and stultifying social norms, confined by other people’s expectations and their projections of what a woman should be.
By turns enraged, funny, frustrated, astute and joyful, these short hybrid pieces (potion = poem + fiction) combine the lyric compression of poetry with the narrative expansiveness of prose. Readers will meander, spellbound, through a wildly imaginative dream world of fairy-tale landscapes, allegorical insights, social satire, thought experiments and vivid surreal imagery, scenes of otherworldly strangeness and haunting beauty. These potions are elixirs in language, some healing, some poisonous, all magical.
About the Authors
Lydia Millet is the author of “A Children’s Bible,” a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top Ten book of the Year. Her first work of short fiction, “Love in Infant Monkeys,” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010; her second, “Fight No More” (2018), won an American Academy of Arts and Sciences short fiction award. “Atavists” is her third work of short fiction. She lives outside Tucson, Arizona.
Lauren K. Watel is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and translator. Her debut collection, “Book of Potions,” won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and will be published by Sarabande Books in 2025. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and The Nation, and she has received awards from Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, and Mississippi Review. A Decatur, Georgia, resident, her prose poem honoring Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was set to music by Pulitzer-winning composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and premiered at the Dallas Symphony.
About Writers at the Wrecking Bar
A Cappella Books presents Writers at the Wrecking Bar, a series of live author interview events showcasing some of the country’s freshest voices in literary and contemporary fiction. Each program includes writers in conversation with an arbiter of Atlanta’s book scene, giving the audience a chance to experience and participate in the Q&A and get a signed copy of the book.
Held upstairs in the Marianna Room of the Wrecking Bar Brewpub, Writers at the Wrecking Bar hosts a cash bar, starting at 7 PM. The author conversation and book signing follow at 7:30 PM.
