The Book of Origins: Rude Tales from the Big Bang to the Big Now

Book excerpt: Lawrence Millman's The Book of Origins is a rattle-your-brains collection of tales in the tradition of George Carlin, Jonathan Swift, and Italo Calvino, but not Jane Austen or Henry James. In its pages, you will learn about a highly moral man who refuses to marry his grandmother, God's failure as a Supreme Being and his subsequent retirement, a man given a prison sentence for writing a novel, a U.S. president who decides to attack other countries because he's horny, a barely educated Middle American who's offered the Nobel Prize in Physics, and numerous other undocumented incidents in our planet's history.