Former SNL writer and The New Yorker staffer Patty Marx employs the weapon she wields best--not that weapon; Patty believes in gun control. Instead, she uses her sharp-edged humor to tackle the most difficult facet of aging: the mind's decline. From forgetting her brother-in-law's name while he was wearing a nametag to hanging up the phone to look for her phone, Marx confesses to her failures, and not only to make you feel better about yourself. In LET'S BE LESS STUPID Patty addresses troubling conundrums, such as: If there are more neural connections in your brain than stars in the Milky Way, why did you put the butter dish in your nightstand drawer? Patty's quest to get smarter includes just about everything: learning Cherokee, popping pills (not the good kind), and listening to--who's the guy who didn't write dum de de dum but the other one?**

Patricia Marx is one of the finest comic writers of her time, as readers of The New Yorker and fans of Saturday Night Live already know. Her fiction debut is an endlessly entertaining comic novel about one woman's romantic fixation on her first boyfriend.Marx's unabashedly neurotic heroine falls for philosopher Eugene Obello during her graduate school days in Cambridge, England. Why would anyone fall for a man who receives a grant to pursue Ego Studies? Why would that person remain obsessed, even after this guy marries and becomes a father? By "obsessed," we mean, well...sex and lusting and longing and hoping and waiting for this cad who is spread too thin. Her friends loathe him. Why can't she drop him? Is it because she was the only virgin on campus before she bumped into Eugene (a man who was hardly a virgin)? Is it because he kept a copy of the Magna Carta in his pocket? "You know what I think it really was?" she reflects. "He was a narcissist. I love ...