Photo: John Miller

At Bookforum, Lydia Millet discusses her new novel, Magnificence.

Fiction constantly deals with personal and individual loss, but very often it stops there. It doesn’t look at the massive, often more-abstract-seeming loss we’re facing during the world’s sixth mass extinction crisis. Which is not merely a biological loss but also a crisis of culture. Cultures and languages are going extinct right along with animals and plants, in a parallel process driven by the same forces. It’s dangerous terrain for literary writers because you want to avoid the kind of polemic it’s easy to fall into about these matters. I tried to take on the terrible weight of extinction in a less than evasive, more than allusive way, and in a way that was personal as well as social and political.