Processed Cheese: A Novel - Hardcover

Wright, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316043370 ISBN 13: 9780316043373

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 2020

Synopsis

From a writer hailed as "astonishing," the savagely funny story of a couple who unexpectedly come into some money in an America deranged by Mammon (Toni Morrison)


A bag of money drops out of the sky, literally, into the path of a cash-starved citizen named Graveyard. He carries it home to his wife, Ambience, and they embark on the adventure of their lives, finally able to have everything they've always deserved: cars, guns, games, jewels, clothes-and of course sex, travel, and time with friends and family. There is no limit except their imagination and the hours in the day, and even those seem to be subject to their control.

Of course, the owner of the bag is searching for it, and will do whatever is necessary to get it back. And of course, these new riches change everything-and nothing at all.

Stephen Wright has woven out of the language, images, and stories of our wealth-obsessed culture a novel of once-in-a-generation vitality and inventiveness. Darkly hilarious, Processed Cheese is both satire and serious as death. It's a road novel, a family story, and a last-girl-standing thriller. With the clarity of a Swift or a Melville, Wright has created a funhouse-mirror drama that puts all the chips on the table, every bullet in the clip, down to the last breathtaking moment.

About this title

About the Author:

Stephen Wright is a Vietnam veteran, MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the author of four previous novels. He has received a Whiting Award in Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and has taught writing and literature at Iowa, Princeton, Brown, and The New School. He was born in Warren, Pennsylvania, and lives in New York City.

Review:

PRAISE FOR PROCESSED CHEESE:

"Processed Cheese does for consumerism what Catch-22 did for war."―Stephen King, bestselling author of IT and The Shining

"In novel after unsparing novel-each one gorgeous, too, and full of awe- Stephen Wright has emerged as a kind of modern-day Socrates hectoring a complacent citizenry to have a good hard look at its collective delusions. With Processed Cheese, he's written a novel so outrageous and diagnostic of our current ills, it will prove much stronger than hemlock. If you hope to keep up your venality, America, your cruelties, and your death wish, better string this court jester up by his toes."―Joshua Ferris, author of The Dinner Party

"Why is Stephen Wright so funny and what can I do to be as funny as him? As perceptive? As inventive? As smart? Not much, I guess. So I'll just sit here reading Processed Cheese over and over while gnashing my teeth."―Gary Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Super Sad True Love Story

"Processed Cheese is a novel of such thrilling extravagance that I swear it spiked my glucose levels. Stephen Wright has given us a fable about America's infatuation with wealth, a limit-test on the question of what, exactly, money can buy. Hilarious, outlandish, deeply troubling, and completely debauched, this book is basically perfect for the current moment."―Nathan Hill, author of The Nix

"Stephen Wright is one of the most original and exciting novelists alive. Processed Cheese was worth the wait."―Kevin Powers, author of the The Yellow Birds

PRAISE FOR STEPHEN WRIGHT

Meditations in Green (1983)

"Precisely that brutal hallucination we desperately wanted to end." --Don DeLillo

"The best that any fiction about this war has offered." --Newsweek

M31: A Family Romance (1988)

"Beautiful and terrifying. . . . M31 offers a big, bold look at the American family. It takes us far away and very close to home. . . . Stephen Wright is a . . . bright star in the literary sky." --San Francisco Chronicle

"M31 is a devastatingly forceful accomplishment and reestablishes its author as a star of the first magnitude." --The Washington Post Book World

"Mr. Wright's sentences buzz like high-tension wires. I enjoyed reading every word of M31, literally." --Russell Banks

Going Native (1994)

"An astonishing novel." --Toni Morrison

The Amalgamation Polka (2007)

"An extravagantly talented novelist. . . . For Wright, America, past and present, is Wonderland, a place of marvels and horrors from which not even the fortunate escape with their heads. " --Laura Miller, The New York Times Book Review

"This dark and lyrical tale of madness and prophecy speaks uncannily from within its period, in the tradition of heartbroken humor, which America's lapses of faith in its own promise have always evoked in the finest of our storytellers, among whom Stephen Wright here honorably takes his place." --Thomas Pynchon

"Quite simply an astonishing novel, brilliantly executed and beautifully written. Stephen Wright deserves to be famous and feted for it."
--The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

About this edition

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 0316043370
• ISBN 13: 9780316043373
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400