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Nine exquisite stories that explore class, desire, identity, and the specter of violence that looms daily over women and the LGBTQ+ community.
An aspiring veterinarian survives a plane crash and starts life over in California. A woman mourns the loss of her childhood friend's innocence and rethinks justice. A queer teacher's sense of safety in the classroom is destroyed. With settings ranging from small-town Minnesota to New Mexico, from bars and bedrooms to a furniture store and a community college, Are You Happy? casts a spotlight on people who try—and often fail—to make peace with their pasts while navigating their present relationships and notions of self. In prose that is evocative and restrained, unpredictable and masterful, Lori Ostlund offers a darkly humorous and compassionate examination of America's preoccupation with loneliness, happiness, guns, and violence.
"These nine startling stories capture the subtleties of feeling—and being made to feel—out of place ... These stories are not comfortable worlds to inhabit, but they are precise and endlessly fascinating ones. Ostlund proves herself a master of the form." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Ostlund's collection coheres with her characters' shared need for emotional and physical safety and their desire to love and be loved—or simply to be seen. These stories will dazzle readers." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Are You Happy? is bright, swift, and heartbreakingly direct in its portrayal of how home can sometimes leave a lingering bruise. Seriously, how does she do it?! Lori Ostlund is funny and wry; her work cuts to the quick. Every story I read made me feel deeply known. I've long been a fan of hers and this book does not disappoint. A short story collection that is truly all hits, no misses." —Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth and Mostly Dead Things
"Are You Happy? is a brutally hilarious heartbreaker. In Lori Ostlund's brilliant stories, the shadows of childhood reappear without warning, threaten to swallow the adult lives her characters have worked so hard to build, and violence lurks under the placid surface of the everyday. There is not one false line in this tremendous collection." —Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise
This information about Are You Happy? was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lori Ostlund's first collection of stories, The Bigness of the World, received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award. It was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, was a Lambda finalist, and was named a Notable Book by The Short Story Prize. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. In 2009, Lori received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award. She is the author of the novel After the Parade and lives in San Francisco.
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