[Reviewlet] Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain, by Lucia Perillo
by Alison Espach
Poet Lucia Perillo’s first foray into fiction is a collection of wonders, obsessions and undeniable urgency.
Alison Espach received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches fiction and creative non-fiction. She is the Fiction Editor of Arch. Her fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, the Del Sol Review, andSentence. She is many coffees away from finishing her first novel. She highly recommends the three short-story collections Do the Windows Open? by Julie Hecht, Where Europe Begins by Yoko Tawada, and In A Bear’s Eye by Yannick Murphy.
Poet Lucia Perillo’s first foray into fiction is a collection of wonders, obsessions and undeniable urgency.
When The Unthinkable happens, how does a person – let alone a writer – deal with it? Billy Lombardo answers that sticky question with How to Hold a Woman, a novel-in-stories about a family dealing with the loss of their eldest child, Isabel. In this review, Alison Espach explores how “the stories become not solely about the pain the family experiences, but more about when and how they feel happiness in light of the tragedy.”
Can men and women ever really be just friends? The infamous, troubling question. It never truly goes away. Probably because it never truly gets answered, despite the fact that the modern novel has tried, over and over again, if not explicitly, or even self-consciously, to do so. But the characters in A. Manette Ansay’s latest novel, Good Things I Wish You (Harper, 2009), are not ashamed to ask such questions or speak boldly, not even to each other on their first, blind date.
