Giorgis: Can you tell me a bit about the surrealist elements in the book? The thing about love, of course, is that your predicament always feels like it’s the most dramatic, earthshaking thing in the world, even—and perhaps especially—when it’s fairly ordinary. The wildly funny, occasionally heartbreaking internationally bestselling memoir about growing up, growing older, and learning to navigate friendships, jobs, loss, and love along the ride

But mostly, you imagine living somewhere else, miles and miles from this cramped and crowded once-thriving capital of the twenti­eth century. You could live in Austin, you think, or Minneapolis. You hear Seattle is gorgeous and you’ve never even been. The town is full of these triggers, and the longer you live here, the more land mines you set. There’s the Gap at Astor Place, the bathroom at the Crocodile Lounge—the odds of stumbling into the lingering smoke of an old flame are staggering, and increasing still with every new significant instant spent with another significant other. The Average of All Possible Things,” follows a character named Lucinda who works as a clerk/researcher at a law firm. She does not like her job very much. For five months, she dates Gavin, one of the lawyers at the firm. Gavin then ends the relationship. At first, Lucinda has trouble getting over the relationship, as she sees Gavin at work often. However, she then eventually begins to heal. Here, have an overly-long excerpt from "You Want to Know What Plays Are Like?", which I absolutely read in Will Arnett's voice before I realized the speaker was a woman: By publishing your document, the content will be optimally indexed by Google via AI and sorted into the right category for over 500 million ePaper readers on YUMPU.You can put to rest the fear that you were a blip in this other person's life, a footnote. What you did was important. You hurt somebody, and somebody hurt you.” Not every story in the collection ends so hopefully, but Bob-Waksberg still conveys a tenuous reverence for love and those who continue to seek it even in the face of disappointment. He traces the tenor of both the show and the new book to many early inspirations: among them, the author David Rakoff’s Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel; Jonathan Safran Foer’s “ A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease”; Katherine Heiny’s “ How to Give the Wrong Impression”; Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments; and the work of George Saunders. I’m kind of a sweet and salty kind of guy. That’s always been my writing—a little bit of both. But as I’ve gotten older, I have gotten less cynical. There was a long time where I was like, I’m gonna be single forever. Relationships are doomed to fail. Nobody can really know you … ‘We live alone in the house of the heart.’ That’s Brian Doyle [who famously considered the capacity of humans to love], another influence. short stories” read byBaron Vaughn, James Urbaniak, Kimiko Glenn, Colman Domingo, andNatalie Morales I fell in love with you a little bit, in that stupid way where you completely make up a fictional version of the person you’re looking at and fall in love with that person.”

It turns out making an asshole a president just means you end up with an asshole president. Probably could’ve guessed that–being president doesn’t change you, not really; it just brings out more of the you that you already are.” Salted Circus Cashews, Swear to God – a short but oddly brilliant reflection on the difficulty and complexity of trusting someone when entering a new relationship…told through the metaphor of a can of cashews that may or may not have a spring-snake-toy inside. This was a perfect start to the collection and basically dissolved any uncertainty I felt about whether this would be a good read.A new creation by the author of Severance, the stories in Bliss Montage crash through our carefully built mirages