Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain
Lucia Perillo
(Author)
21,000+ Reviews
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Description
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 draw the boundaries between these two zones. What's funny, what's heartbreaking, and who gets to decide?
Product Details
Price
$14.95
$13.90
Publisher
W. W. Norton & Company
Publish Date
May 20, 2013
Pages
211
Dimensions
5.4 X 0.6 X 8.1 inches | 0.35 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780393345469
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
Lucia Perillo (1958-2016) is the author of many collections of poetry: Dangerous Life, which won the Norma Farber Award for best first book; The Body Mutinies, which received the PEN Revson Foundation Fellowship and the Kate Tufts Poetry Award; The Oldest Map with the Name America; Luck Is Luck, which won the Kingsley Tufts Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Inseminating the Elephant and On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths. Perillo's poetry, essays, and short fiction have appeared in the Paris Review, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and other magazines, and have been included in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart anthologies. She received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2000. She has taught at Syracuse University, Saint Martin's University, and Southern Illinois University.
Reviews
Darned if this book isn't more cheerful than anything else. It's very funny and often beautiful, though not in the corny way of fiction that glorifies bad behavior or romanticizes hardship. It's deeper than that, in the way that earned wisdom always is. . . . [Perillo] brings to these stories the poet's gift for creating images in the mind so apt, they're surprising, even funny.
Starred review. Emotionally unflinching stories of considerable power, wonder and humor.
Starred review. [Perillo] strikes a glorious balance between wryly intelligent prose and emotional force, recalling Alice Munro at her best.
Starred review. These tales are as beautifully patterned as poetry, saturated in feeling, open to ambiguity, and laced with electrifying images.
Relentlessly compassionate, this is a collection for the mistake makers and trying-as-hard-as-we-canners of the world--which probably means all of us.--Book of the Week Pick
Starred review. Emotionally unflinching stories of considerable power, wonder and humor.
Starred review. [Perillo] strikes a glorious balance between wryly intelligent prose and emotional force, recalling Alice Munro at her best.
Starred review. These tales are as beautifully patterned as poetry, saturated in feeling, open to ambiguity, and laced with electrifying images.
Relentlessly compassionate, this is a collection for the mistake makers and trying-as-hard-as-we-canners of the world--which probably means all of us.--Book of the Week Pick
