A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction A number one New York Times Bestseller A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving memoir of a college student who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. This exhilarating debut, at once hilarious and wildly inventive, reinvented the memoir for the twenty-first century.