β Scribed by David Gilbert
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Download the reading guide for this book here In this critically acclaimed comic masterpiece, David Gilbert tells the story of Billy Schine, a young man who innocently enrolls in a 14-day human drug testing study and finds his normal world turned upside-down. Like a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for the postmodern age, The Normals is a tour de force from a writer of astonishing intelligence and imagination. "Much of [The Normals] antic humor derives from Gilbert's unerring grasp of America's varied forms of self-medication. But what makes this first novel memorable is its exploration of the contradictory desire both to escape the world and to be plunged back into it."-New Yorker "Wild and woolly...a trenchant study of human suggestibility, tricked out with a wry subplot about the media hoopla surrounding a brain-tumor victim whose latest MRI bears a striking resemblance to the Shroud of Turin."-Seattle Times "T.C. Boyle meets Alice Sebold with a bit of Paul Theroux...Gilbert...
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