The Heat Death of the Universe and Other Stories

In three stories and two novellas, Pamela Zoline's extraordinary fiction propels the reader from the thermodynamic entropy of a housewife's kitchen to a foreign traveler's exhausting derangement of the senses, and from a logical project to end the possibility of nuclear conflict to an encyclopedic cure for insomnia, all before encountering what must surely be the most catastrophically hilarious genealogy in modern fiction.