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Highly Unlikely Scenario, A : Or, a Neetsa Pizza Employee's Guide to Saving the World Paperback – 23 Jan. 2014

3.3 out of 5 stars 47 ratings

A dazzling debut novel wherein medieval Kabbalists, rare book librarians and Latter-Day Baconians skirmish for control over secret mystical knowledge, and - in this future ruled by competing giant fast food factions - one Neetsa Pizza employee discovers that no-one ever saved the world with pizza coupons. A brilliant sci-fi / literary crossover title with a healthy sense of the absurd, written in the same tongue-in-cheek spirit as Douglas Adams' Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (1978).

Product description

Review

'It's as if Kurt Vonnegut and Italo Calvino collaborated to write a comic book sci-fi adventure and persuaded Chagall to do the drawings... One of the freshest and most lively novels I have encountered for quite a while.' - Jim Crace

'
A Highly Unlikely Scenario is a joyful book, full of the energy of undiluted invention and the thoughtful imagination of a writer to watch. It's a wild ride and much more funny, intelligent and entirely pleasing.' - A.L. Kennedy

'It's not wacky. It's not a romp. It's not 'English'. It is very good... exceeds our expectations of the genre by properly reflecting the surreal and anarchic nature of the universe. Not space comedy then, but a riff on a cosmic joke - the idea that any of us knows what's going on.' -
The Independent on Sunday

'The great pleasure of such novels is the world-building, in which the author invents a new universe while playfully commenting on our own. And what Cantor does of this is great, her impish prose and dry wit perfectly suited to the task.' - --The Daily Telegraph

"Cosmic and comic, full of philosophy, mysticism and celestial whimsy. Both profoundly wild and wildly profound." --Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

About the Author

RACHEL CANTOR was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and raised in Rome. She worked for jazz festivals in France and food festivals in Australia before getting degrees in international development and fiction writing. Her short stories have appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, Kenyon Review, Fence, and other publications. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and elsewhere, and has been a scholar at the Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Wesleyan Writing Conferences. She lives in Brooklyn.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ MELVILLE HOUSE PUBLISHING
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ 23 Jan. 2014
  • Edition ‏ : ‎ Original
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 250 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1612192645
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1612192642
  • Item weight ‏ : ‎ 209 g
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.97 x 1.78 x 19 cm
  • Best Sellers Rank: 4,609,467 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • Customer reviews:
    3.3 out of 5 stars 47 ratings

About the author

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Rachel Cantor
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I am the author of the novels Half-Life of a Stolen Sister (Soho Press 2023), Good on Paper (Melville House 2016), and A Highly Unlikely Scenario, or a Neetsa Pizza Employee's Guide to Saving the World (Melville House 2014).

I live in New York, in the writerly borough of Brooklyn, but have also made my home in most U.S. states between Virginia and Vermont. In addition to writing fiction, I freelance as a writer for nonprofits that work in low-income countries. I’ve worked everywhere from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe (most recently in Laos, Namibia, and Nigeria). I spent much of my adolescence in Rome, and as a young adult, wandered the world--working on food festivals in Melbourne, Australia, and European jazz festivals in France; living in rural Gujarat while interning for a Gandhian nonprofit; and teaching Afghan women refugees in Peshawar, Pakistan. I am a native New Englander; my love for the Boston Red Sox is fanatical.

My stories have appeared in magazines such as the Paris Review, One Story, Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Fence, and Volume 1 Brooklyn. They have been anthologized, nominated for three Pushcart Prizes, and short-listed by both the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. I have also written about fiction for National Public Radio, the Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. I'm hard at work now on a series of middle grade and young adult books set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Customer reviews

3.3 out of 5 stars
47 global ratings

Top reviews from United Kingdom

  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 13 February 2014
    Format: Paperback
    I'm all for books about dystopian futures but this one was wa-a-ay too weird and off the wall for me. Such a great idea for a plot too - fast food companies running the world - but the author failed to conjure up that world and I just couldn't picture it in my mind's eye.

    Instead, Rachel Cantor delivered up a conventional 'hero' - 24 year old Leonard, no parents, no luck with girls, missing his dead grandpa - and then just ran amok with all the other elements of the story, most of which were completely inscrutable. Out of this world - and not in a good way.
    2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

  • Ross Nelson
    3.0 out of 5 stars Has a strong YA vibe that I didn't expect
    Reviewed in the United States on 11 June 2014
    Have read the initial premise of the book, I was intrigued and it sounded fun. And it is, it's got an imaginative idea and some clever, whimsical touches. A quarter of the way through the book, I was hooked and expected it to go deeper. It didn't.

    For all the knowledge it touches on (Roger Bacon, the Kabbalah, Marco Polo), it never goes beyond the surface, and the relationships between the characters stays at the basic Nancy Drew/Hardy Boy's level of kids who develop a certain interest in one another but do nothing more than hold hands, despite supposedly being in their mid-20s. (I'm not saying there should be steamy sex scenes or anything, just that as characters they seemed too young and underdeveloped.)

    Definitely feels more like a story for intellectually precocious teens than for adults.
  • jazzycar
    5.0 out of 5 stars Bizarre, funny and fabulous
    Reviewed in the United States on 2 March 2014
    it's hard to write a review of this book because it is so unusual. It's very funny, in a wry, understated way. It is set in an interesting world which is not described in detail but allowed to reveal itself in different events and asides, and remains largely mysterious even once the book is finished. It contains an unusual - bizarre maybe - mix of sci/fi/fantasy, Jewish mysticism and historical figures and fact which were all blended into a truly enjoyable, un-put-down-able read - for me at least. If you like your stories to start at the beginning, end at the end, and explain everything precisely in detail in the middle, then you might not enjoy this one. If you like to be challenged to read between the lines, put disparate info together and laugh a lot, you might enjoy this.
  • Doc
    4.0 out of 5 stars What's it about?
    Reviewed in the United States on 20 March 2014
    I asked myself all through this book, what is it about? I never got an answer. I did discover that readers of Alice in Wonderland, the first disc world book bybTerry Pratchett, viewers of lost or the sci fi series Helix asked the same question. What is it about? Who knows, but they were all hits! So might this book be a hit.

    I enjoyed the challenge of trying to make sense of a novel that appears to be about some dystopian land and city and also about traveling 700 hundred years to a past Rome and about a city where fast food is the end all and be all and about a young Jewish boy trying to hold his family together and about a dozen more plot elements.

    This review makes no sense, nor does the book. Regardless, it should be read so you can challenge yourself to determine whether it makes sense or not.
  • John Brumbaugh
    1.0 out of 5 stars I only finished because I was stuck on a Transatlantic flight without another book
    Reviewed in the United States on 13 March 2014
    I don't know if it was the mysticism, or what I perceived to be poor writing, but I was never into this book at all. Had I not been on an airplane, I probably would have stopped reading this book at the end of the first part. I didn't think there was anything that got me to want to engage any further in the book at all as the main characters were poorly written and constructed. Maybe if I knew of the mysticism they were talking about throughout I would have liked it more, but in general I didn't feel like there was a hook to get me interested or even a storyline that had me thinking "how is this going to end?"
  • Caleb
    2.0 out of 5 stars Not in a good way.
    Reviewed in the United States on 4 April 2017
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    This book was extremely weird. Not in a good way.