Millet, Lydia. How The Dead Dream.

How the Dead Dream follows the gradual transformation of a real-estate developer obsessed with money into a man concerned with animals on the brink of extinction. Dealing with the death of his partner, the protagonist regularly breaks into zoos and enclosures of ‘final animals’ to share their feelings of loneliness and loss. The novel employs irony to explore the similarities between humans and animals in order to emphasize the tragedy of captive animals longing for a home that no longer exists.

Secondary readings:

• Soper, Ella. 2013. “Grieving Final Animals and Other Acts of Dissent: Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 20 (4): 746 – 756.
• Bateman, Benjamin. 2019. “A Flattened Protagonist: Sleep and Environmental Mitigation in Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 12.  

Millet, Lydia. 2007. How The Dead Dream. Berkeley: Counterpoint Press.