HAPPILY

Revelatory, whimsical, and utterly inspired, HAPPILY is a testament to the singularity of Sabrina Orah Mark's voice and the power of the fantastical to reveal essential truths about life, love, and the meaning of family.

The literary tradition of the fairy tale has long endured as the vehicle by which we interrogate the laws of reality. In HAPPILY, Sabrina Orah Mark reimagines the modern fairy tale, turning it inside out and searching it for the wisdom to better understand our contemporary moment. These fantastical stories of fairy tales, populated with wolves, kings, and wicked witches, have served throughout history as a template for understanding culture, society, and even the muddy terrain we call our collective human psyche. Set against the backdrop of political upheaval, viral plague, social protest, and climate change, Mark locates the magic in the mundane and illuminates how surreal our lives really are.

The essays of Mark are for fans of memoir that turns a critical eye to literary, cultural, and feminist topics like Cathy Park Hong's MINOR FEELINGS, Jia Tolentino's TRICK MIRROR, Rebecca Solnit's MEN EXPLAINS THINGS TO ME, Sheila Heti's MOTHERHOOD, and Maggie Nelson's THE ARGONAUTS. But also for fans of magical realism and writers that mix the mundane with the fantastical like Kelly Link's GET IN TROUBLE, and Carmen Maria Machado's IN THE DREAM HOUSE.

HAPPILY is a beautiful literary memoir-in-essays on fairy tales and their surprising relevance to modern life, from a Jewish woman raising her Black children in the American South - based on her acclaimed Paris Review column "Happily".
There are a total of 18 essays here, including 3 all-new pieces. This book is more than just a collection of Mark's columns. There is new material and insight braided throughout.

Sabrina Orah Mark is an award-winning fiction writer and poet, who has written her column for The Paris Review since 2018. Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Mark earned a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University. She also earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a PhD in English from the University of Georgia. She is the author of the poetry collections, TSIM TSUM, and THE BABIES (winner of the Saturnalia Book Prize). Her collection of stories, WILD MILK, won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for Short Story and was a finalist for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. Mark's accomplishments include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center, and a Creative Capital Award. She lives in Athens, Georgia, with her family.