Processed Cheese cover art

Processed Cheese

A Novel

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Processed Cheese

By: Stephen Wright
Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £22.59

Buy Now for £22.59

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

 From an "astonishing" writer (Toni Morrison), the savagely funny story of a couple who unexpectedly come into some money in a wealth-obsessed America deranged by Mammon. A bag of money drops out of the sky, literally, into the path of a cash-starved citizen named Graveyard. He carries it home to his wife, Ambience, and they embark on the adventure of their lives, finally able to have everything they've always thought they deserved: cars, guns, games, jewels, clothes—and of course sex, travel, and time with friends and family. There is no limit except their imagination and the hours in the day, and even those seem to be subject to their control. Of course, the owner of the bag is searching for it, and will do whatever is necessary to get it back. And, of course, these new riches change everything—and nothing at all. Darkly hilarious, Processed Cheese is both satire and serious as death. It's a road novel, a family story, and a last-girl-standing thriller of once-in-a-generation vitality and inventiveness. With the clarity of a Swift or a Melville, Wright has created a funhouse-mirror drama that puts all the chips on the table and every bullet in the clip, down to the last breathtaking moment. Dark Humour Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Satire

Critic reviews

PRAISE FOR PROCESSED CHEESE:
"Absolutely brilliant, a frenetic, hilarious rush of pure feeling...the pacing is a thrill... [Wright's] a masterly writer, with a wild sense of humor.. sentences, so wonderful, so bizarre, $100 bills pulled endlessly from a canvas bag."—Kevin Wilson, New York Times
"An outrageous farce about money, sex and guns, which is to say, about America circa now...Nothing else I've read is as faithful to the obscenity of these latter days, the consummation of vacuous pop culture and complete social bankruptcy. For readers who can stomach it, PROCESSED CHEESE is jolting enough to reveal what degradation we've become inured to."—Ron Charles, Washington Post
"In a fairer- or at least weirder- literary world, Stephen Wright would be as famous as Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo...PROCESSED CHEESE is a difficult novel to love, but an easy one to admire, and with it, Wright cements his reputation as one of the country's greatest living writers of fiction. An excoriating critique of what America has become, PROCESSED CHEESE is an exhausting, maddening and unforgettable book about how far we're willing to go to satisfy our greed."—Michael Schaub, NPR
"A wry satire of a money-obsessed society."—USA Today, 5 Books Not to Miss
"Processed Cheese does for consumerism what Catch-22 did for war."—Stephen King, bestselling author of IT and The Shining
"Wildly imaginative, funny, dark, endlessly inventive, Stephen Wright is one of our most original and essential American novelists."—Francine Prose, author of A Changed Man and Blue Angel
"For many of us, Stephen Wright counts among the Famous Monsters of the postmodern novel. His too-infrequent, wildly divergent books each land as an event- guaranteed only to be unpredictable and brilliant, loaded with wit and heartfelt indignation."—Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Feral Detective
"Why is Stephen Wright so funny and what can I do to be as funny as him? As perceptive? As inventive? As smart? Not much, I guess. So I'll just sit here reading Processed Cheese over and over while gnashing my teeth."—Gary Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Super Sad True Love Story
"In novel after unsparing novel-each one gorgeous, too, and full of awe- Stephen Wright has emerged as a kind of modern-day Socrates hectoring a complacent citizenry to have a good hard look at its collective delusions. With Processed Cheese, he's written a novel so outrageous and diagnostic of our current ills, it will prove much stronger than hemlock. If you hope to keep up your venality, America, your cruelties, and your death wish, better string this court jester up by his toes."—Joshua Ferris, author of The Dinner Party
No reviews yet