Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories
By Lucia Perillo
Read by Carrington MacDuffie
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4 Formats: Digital Download
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4 Formats: Digital Rental
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4 Formats: CD
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4 Formats: MP3 CD
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$6.95
ISBN: 9781482139754
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$24.95
ISBN: 9781470823801
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$29.95
ISBN: 9781470823818
A stunning debut from an award-winning poet Populating a small town in the Pacific Northwest, the characters in Lucia Perillo’s story collection all resist giving the world what it expects of them—and are surprised when the world comes roaring back. An addict trapped in a country house becomes obsessed with vacuum cleaners and the people who sell them door-to-door. An abandoned woman seeks consolation in tales of armed robbery told by one of her fellow suburban housewives. An accidental mother struggles to answer her daughter’s badgering about her paternity. And in three stories readers meet Louisa, a woman with Down syndrome who serves as an accomplice to her younger sister’s sexual exploits and her aging mother’s fantasies of revenge. Together, Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain is a sharp-edged, witty testament to the ambivalence of emotions, the way they pull in directions that often cancel one another out or twist their subjects into knots. In lyrical prose, Perillo draws on her training as a naturalist and a poet to map the terrain of the comic and the tragic, asking how we mark the boundaries between these two zones. What’s funny, what’s heartbreaking, and who gets to decide?
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Summary
Summary
A 2012 San Francisco Chronicle Best Book for Fiction
A 2012 Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book for Fiction
One of the 2012 Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books for Fiction
A Kirkus Reviews “New and Notable Title”, May 2012
A stunning debut from an award-winning poet
Populating a small town in the Pacific Northwest, the characters in Lucia Perillo’s story collection all resist giving the world what it expects of them—and are surprised when the world comes
roaring back.
An addict trapped in a country house becomes obsessed with vacuum cleaners and the people who sell them door-to-door. An abandoned woman seeks consolation in tales of armed robbery told by one of
her fellow suburban housewives. An accidental mother struggles to answer her daughter’s badgering about her paternity. And in three stories readers meet Louisa, a woman with Down syndrome who
serves as an accomplice to her younger sister’s sexual exploits and her aging mother’s fantasies of revenge.
Together, Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain is a sharp-edged, witty testament to the ambivalence of emotions, the way they pull in directions that often cancel one another out or twist
their subjects into knots. In lyrical prose, Perillo draws on her training as a naturalist and a poet to map the terrain of the comic and the tragic, asking how we mark the boundaries between these
two zones. What’s funny, what’s heartbreaking, and who gets to decide?
Editorial Reviews
Editorial Reviews
Details
Details
Available Formats : | Digital Download, Digital Rental, CD, MP3 CD |
Category: | Fiction |
Runtime: | 5.32 |
Audience: | Adult |
Language: | English |
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