Bream gives me hiccups & other stories
By: Jesse Eisenberg
Publisher: Grove Press UK
Published: 2015
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9781611855609; 9781611859720
Subjects: American Humorous stories
Work titles: Short stories
Description: Taking its title from a group of stories that begin the book, Bream Gives Me Hiccups moves from contemporary L.A. to the dorm rooms of an American college to ancient Pompeii, throwing the reader into a universe of social misfits, reimagined scenes from history, and ridiculous overreactions. In one piece, a tense email exchange between a young man and his girlfriend is taken over by his sister, who is obsessed with the Bosnian genocide (The situation reminds me of a little historical blip called the Kara♯or♯evo agreement); in another, a college freshman forced to live with a roommate is stunned when one of her ramen packets goes missing (she didn't have "one" of my ramens. She had a chicken ramen); in another piece, Alexander Graham Bell has teething problems with his invention (I've been calling Mabel all day, she doesn't pick up! Yes, of course I dialed the right number--2!).
Table of contents: title: Bream gives me hiccups: restaurant reviews from a privileged nine-year-old --; title: Family; title: My little sister texts me with her problems; title: Separation anxiety sleepaway camp; title: My mother explains the ballet to me; title: Email exchange with my first girlfriend, which at a certain point is taken over by my older sister, a college student studying the Bosnian genocide; title: My prescription information pamphlets as written by my father; title: My nephew has some questions --; title: History; title: Men and dancing; title: Final conversation at Pompeii; title: Alexander Graham Bell's first five phone calls; title: Marxist-Socialist jokes --; title: My roommate stole my ramen: letters from a frustrated freshman --; title: Dating; title: Post-gender-normative man tries to pick up a woman at a bar; title: Post-gender-normative woman tries to pick up a man at a bar; title: Guy on acid tries to pick up a woman at a bar; title: Lifelong teatotaler, embarrassed by his own sobriety, tries to pick up a woman at a bar --; title: Sports; title: Marv Alpert is my therapist; title: Carmelo Anthony and I debrief our friends after a pickup game at the YMCA; title: Marriage counselor tries to heckle at a Knicks game --; title: Self-help; title: Smiling tricks your brain into thinking it's happy; title: If she ran into me now...; title: Bully does his research --; title: Language; title: Nick Garrett's review of Rachel Lowenstein's new book, Getting away; title: A short story written with thought-to-text technology; title: If I was fluent in...; title: My spam plays hard to get; title: Manageable tongue twisters --; title: We only have time for one more; title: We only have time for one more.