Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories
10 best books like Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories (Lucia Perillo): Night at the Fiestas, Zero Saints, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, Jesus' Son, Death Is Not an Option, Turbulence, Train Dreams, American Salvage, Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories, The Long and Faraway Gone
| Author | Kirstin Valdez Quade |
| ISBN | 0393352218 |
With intensity and emotional precision, Kirstin Valdez Quade's unforgettable stories plunge us into the fierce, troubled hearts of characters defined by the desire to escape the past or else to plumb its depths. The deadbeat father of a pregnant teenager tries to transform his life by playing the...
Enforcer and drug dealer Fernando has seen better days. On his way home from work, some heavily-tattooed gangsters throw him in the back of a car and take him to an abandoned house, where they saw off his friend's head and feed the kid's fingers to...something. Their message is clear: this is their territory,...
| Author | Danielle Evans |
| ISBN | 1594487693 |
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self offers a bold new perspective on the experience of being young and African-American or mixed-race in modern-day America. In each of her stories, Danielle Evans explores the non-white American experience with honesty, wisdom, and humor. They are striking in...
| Author | Denis Johnson |
| ISBN | 0060975776 |
Jesus' Son, the first collection of stories by Denis Johnson, presents a unique, hallucinatory vision of contemporary American life unmatched in power and immediacy and marks a new level of achievement for this acclaimed writer. In their intensity of perception, their neon-lit evocation of a strange...
| Author | Suzanne Rivecca |
| ISBN | 0393072568 |
Death Is Not an Option is a bold, dazzling debut collection about girls and women in a world where sexuality and self-delusion collide. In these stories, a teacher obsesses over a student who comes to class with scratch marks on his face; a Catholic girl graduating high school finds a warped kind of redemption...
| Author | David Szalay |
| ISBN | 1982122730 |
From the acclaimed, Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of All That Man Is, a stunning, virtuosic novel about twelve people, mostly strangers, and the surprising ripple effect each one has on the life of the next as they cross paths while in transit around the world.
A woman strikes up a conversation...
| Author | Denis Johnson |
| ISBN | 1250007658 |
Denis Johnson's Train Dreams is an epic in miniature, one of his most evocative and poignant fictions. It is the story of Robert Grainier, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century---an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles...
“These short stories approach their subjects from an array of perspectives, but what they share is freshness, surprise, and a compulsion to plumb some absolute extremes of American existence.”—National Book Award citation
American Salvage is rich with local color and peopled with...
| Author | Melinda Moustakis |
| ISBN | 0820338931 |
In her debut collection, Melinda Moustakis brings to life a rough-and-tumble family of Alaskan homesteaders through a series of linked stories. Born in Alaska herself to a family with a homesteading legacy, Moustakis examines the near-mythological accounts of the Alaskan wilderness that are her...
The Long and Faraway Gone
| Author | Lou Berney |
| ISBN | 0062292439 |
With the compelling narrative tension and psychological complexity of the works of Laura Lippman, Dennis Lehane, Kate Atkinson, and Michael Connelly, Edgar Award-nominee Lou Berney’s The Long and Faraway Gone is a smart, fiercely compassionate crime story that explores the mysteries of memory...
When war widow Irene Sandle goes to work in New Zealand’s tobacco fields in 1952, she hopes to start a new, independent life for herself and her daughter – but the tragic repercussions of her decision will resonate long after Irene has gone.
Each of Irene’s children carries the events...
