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Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

PROCESSED CHEESE

Stephen Wright

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)

TEN YEARS IN THE WRITING, PROCESSED CHEESE is a savage, comic funhouse-mirror portrait of our maddened world, following Graveyard and Ambience, two ordinary citizens who come into
some money . . .
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.

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.
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Published 2020-01-01 by Little, Brown

Comments

It all begins when a seemingly bottomless bag of money literally falls from the sky next to Graveyard, an unambitious dreamer. His newfound wealth lifts his depressed, bedridden wife, Ambience, out of her stupor, and Graveyard and Ambience begin to spend voraciously. As they are tailed by the grotesque MisterMenu—who wants his money back—they encounter a series of outlandish characters, each obsessed with some mixture of money, violence, or pleasure. Like Mark Leyner's Et Tu, Babe (1992) or Chris Bachelder's Bear v. Shark (2001), much-awarded Wright tells this unnerving tale in relentless prose that feels like one is flicking through channels on late-night television, or leaving YouTube on autoplay. Exploring the conspiracies, crimes, and proclivities of the hyperwealthy, Wright's novel holds up a funhouse mirror to our time that solely reflects the vacuous, the excessive, and the grotesque. In this road novel, cartoonish satire, and brutal exploration of the influence of capital, Wright's unique voice, much lauded by his peers, offers a darkly comic, often startlingly original vision of the contemporary world. — Alexander Moran

Vorabdruck: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/books/review/processed-cheese-by-stephen-wright-an-excerpt.html

„An outrageous farce about money, sex and guns, which is to say, about America circa now [ ] Nothing else I've read is as faithful to the obscenity of these latter days, the consummation of vacuous pop culture and complete social bankruptcy. For readers who can stomach it, “Processed Cheese” is jolting enough to reveal what degradation we've become inured to.” Read more...

“[A] bizarro vision of our world [...] absolutely brilliant, a frenetic, hilarious rush of pure feeling. [Wright's] a masterly writer, with a wild sense of humor.” Read more...

In a fairer ?— or at least weirder ?— literary world, Stephen Wright would be as famous as Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo. He's has only written five novels since his debut in 1983 with Meditations in Green, but two of them, M31: A Family Romance and Going Native, are among the best of the last century. Wright is an unpredictable author with an unwavering commitment to the surreal; you get the feeling he couldn't write a straight story even if he wanted to. And it's pretty clear he's never wanted to. Wright's latest book, Processed Cheese, is every bit as bizarre as its predecessors. It's a novel that's simultaneously angry and resigned, a darkly funny satire of American consumer culture in all its greed, lust and sloth — really, just name a deadly sin. Dizzying and bleak, it's Wright at his best. Read more...