"Darkly hilarious" short stories by the acclaimed author of Lay It on My Heart (San Francisco Chronicle).   Set in the Bible Belt and featuring young women whose passions and emotions are often at war with the strict demands of their religious backgrounds, these stories of friendships, families, and fundamentalists mark the debut of a remarkable new literary talent.   "In these eight carefully wrought stories, set mostly in Kentucky, an exorcism is performed in the basement of a Methodist church, a teen-ager becomes convinced that she is 'history's second pregnant virgin,' a divorced father returns from a trip to Jerusalem under the impression that he is a prophet, and an elderly churchwoman performs home surgeries with a bottle of Jim Beam and an ice pick. . . . Pneuman shrewdly probes the dark underside of idealized emotions like faith, frequently employing adolescent narrators to reveal adults' hypocrisy." --The New Yorker   "Not the kind of girls you'd expect to meet in the evangelical Christian communities that Pneuman brings to life. Her girls dance and swear, drink and lie; they deflower each other with cucumbers and threaten their mothers with golf clubs. Pneuman . . . offers a clear-eyed view of the role religion plays in the lives of her characters. But her real subject is the complexity of female relationships, the ways that women depend on each other in a world where men often make themselves scarce." --San Francisco Chronicle   "The quietly desperate girls who slouch and grimace and pray through Angela Pneuman's pitch-perfect debut story collection, Home Remedies, live in Bible Belt Kentucky and have names like Priscilla and Shiloh and Laeticia. They have mothers who suck the air out of a room and keen about love . . . best friends as benign as scorpions, and fathers who are absent or dying or crazed. With her dark sense of humor and almost eerie apprehension of what people are too clenched to say, Pneuman is a stunning new talent to watch." --O, The Oprah Magazine   "Angela Pneuman must surely be one of the most gifted young writers around." --Lorrie Moore, New York Times-bestselling author of Birds of America