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Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories
Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain Stories Author:Lucia Perillo A tough-minded collection of stories that boldly announces the fiction debut of a Pulitzer Prize?nominated poet and MacArthur Fellow.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. An addict trapped in a country house becomes obsessed with v... more »acuum cleaners; an abandoned woman seeks consolation in tales of armed robbery told by a suburban housewife; 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, the stories in Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain are sharp-edged, witty testaments to the ambivalence of emotions. In measured, intelligent 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 bounds between these two zones.« less