Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Summary and book reviews of Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain by Lucia Perillo, plus links to an excerpt from Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain and a biography of Lucia Perillo.
Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain Stories
by Lucia Perillo
Hardcover: May 2012,
224 pages.
Paperback: May 2013,
224 pages.
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?
Lucia Perillo has previously published over half a dozen books of poetry; no surprise, considering this book is full of stories short on words and long on nuance. She seems to come to no conclusions on what the human condition is, or what it means. At the same time, she presents all kinds of evidence that every one of us is inept and needy, yet wonderful in spite of ourselves. This is a book to make us feel better about our shortcomings - even in the deepest despair there is hope. (Reviewed by Beverly Melven).
New York Times Book Review Happiness is full of straightforward sentences in straightforward narratives, as you might expect from someone who understands the mechanics of storytelling but hasn’t yet written much fiction.
Library Journal
A memorable collection.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This volume's vibrant stories demonstrate the full potential of the short story form when put in the hands of a true artist.
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. Emotionally unflinching stories of considerable power, wonder and humor.
Tom Perrotta
Lucia Perillo isn't just a strikingly original poet; she's a top-notch fiction writer as well. The stories in this bleakly funny and harrowing collection are reminiscent of both Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson, but the vision than animates them is Perillo's own, unique and unmistakable.
The Gifford Pinchot National Forest is featured in a few of the stories in Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain. Several characters maintain trails and clear brush, and these serve as interesting metaphors for dealing with life's hurdles. But of course, a national park is more than just a metaphor.
Named for the first Chief Forester of the U.S. Forest Service, the Gifford Pinchot National Forest is located in the Cascade mountain range in Southwestern Washington State. It has gone through several name changes, but was first set aside in 1897 and is therefore one of the oldest national forests in the United States. It currently encompasses 1.3 million acres which now includes the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. In the USA, a National Monument is a protected area similar to a National Park except that the President of the United States can declare an area to be a...
Award-winning writer Maile Meloy’s return to short stories explores complex lives in an austere landscape with the clear-sightedness that first endeared her to readers.
A luminous collection of heartbreaking, vivid, startling, and gloriously unique stories set amongst the Filipino-American communities of California and the Philippines.
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(712 words).
Publishers Weekly
Tom Perrotta
Named for the first Chief Forester of the U.S. Forest Service, the Gifford Pinchot National Forest is located in the Cascade mountain range in Southwestern Washington State. It has gone through several name changes, but was first set aside in 1897 and is therefore one of the oldest national forests in the United States. It currently encompasses 1.3 million acres which now includes the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. In the USA, a National Monument is a protected area similar to a National Park except that the President of the United States can declare an area to be a...
