Book excerpt: When Yuvi’s wife finds him in his underwear, standing on top of his desk, she isn’t particularly impressed with his writing habits. But Yuvi worries. He has a wife who wants things he can’t give her, an editor who wants a book he can’t deliver, a brother-in-law whose gastrointestinal disease may lead him to a morbid end, and dead parents who, well, they don’t really want anything, but that doesn’t stop the memory of them from haunting him. As the structure of Yuvi’s novel falls apart, so do his life and marriage. His novel and his life blend together as Yuvi struggles to pull out of the mess. He travels from his suburban Jewish childhood in Atlanta to the North Carolina mountains of his father’s youth, to several hospital waiting rooms, to the living room of a grieving Palestinian man, and even to Uranus (and back, of course). Heartbreaking and hilarious, 'A Brilliant Novel in the Works' is the utterly original debut novel from Yuvi Zalkow, praised by Cheryl Strayed as “the secret love child of the smartest person you’ve ever met and the weirdo who lives down the block.”