The Great Happiness

the long version

"If anything is going to get us through these frightening times, it's this fiction meant to delight from the writer known as "the bizarre Alice Munro." A collection of sixty-plus miniature fictions riffing on the theme of happiness, The Great Happiness is an antidote to the all-pervasive climate of doom we are living through. We often forget that it's good to be alive: forget to laugh, forget to love, forget the possibility of joyous moments. Many of the book's miniatures are narratives with a twist, radiating from a particular avenue in a particular West Coast town. Others are imaginative flights, such as the recently dead experimental novelist "sitting in" on the obituary-writing session convened by her husband, or the woman who rescues an Atlantic lobster from Save-On-Foods and ships it to P.E.I. to be released back into the ocean. These miniatures are "fictions that think," each one a combination of narrative, prose poem, and joke, always heeding Charles Simic's dictum to keep it brief and "tell us everything.""--