Perseus Academic: Confessions of a Memory Eater by Pagan Kennedy

Complicated, cool and vulnerable at the same time…you can't help falling for Pagan Kennedy's characters.—Stephen Dubner, The New York Times

Once a brilliant historian with a promising academic future, Win Duncan is at a crossroads in his career when he is mysteriously summoned by Litminov, a wild but brilliant chemist from his college days. Litminov has made millions since, and has bought a pharmaceutical company solely to develop MEM, an experimental drug that gives one the ability to recall life’s best memories with crystal clarity. Duncan becomes a beta tester and loses himself to the most delicious moments of his past—those precious few years with his mother who died tragically when he was just a child; ecstatic sex with his wife when they first fell in love—until he discovers the dark side effects of a drug that turns the past into pornography and renders the present useless.

A proven master of underground lit, beat fiction and narrative non-fiction, Pagan Kennedy takes on America’s obsession with the idealized past with freshness, wit, and an uncanny ability to measure the pulse of post-modern culture.

Pagan Kennedy is the author of seven books. The most recent, Black Livingstone, was a New York Times Notable Book and a winner of the Massachusetts Book Award. Her novel Spinsters won a Barnes & Noble Discover Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award. Her articles appear regularly in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Spin, and Salon.

Pagan Kennedy is the author of seven books. The most recent, Black Livingstone, was a New York Times Notable Book and a winner of the Massachusetts Book Award. Her novel Spinsters won a Barnes & Noble Discover Award and was short-listed for Great Britain's Orange Prize. Her articles appear regularly in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Spin, and Salon.