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Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

HAPPY LIKE THIS

Ashley Wurzbacher

The characters in Happy Like This are smart girls and professional women—social scientists, linguists, speech therapists, plant physiologists, dancers—who search for happiness in roles and relationships that are often unscripted or unconventional. In the midst of their ambivalence about marriage, monogamy, and motherhood and their struggles to accept and love their bodies, they look to other women for solidarity, stability, and validation. Sometimes they find it; sometimes they don't. Spanning a wide range of distinct perspectives, voices, styles, and settings, the ten shimmering stories in Happy Like This offer deeply felt, often humorous meditations on the complexity of choice and the ambiguity of happiness.

Ashley Wurzbacher's writing has appeared in the Iowa Review, Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and teaches creative writing at the University of Montevallo. Her debut novel will be published by Atria in 2022.
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Book

Published 2019-10-01 by University of Iowa Press

Comments

"Wurzbacher...deploys her encyclopedic command of various ideas, regions,professions and lexicons with the authority of seasoned masters like Adam Johnson. This is a writer at the top of her game; but hopefully she's only just getting started." --The New York Times

“Full of strange ordinariness of relating, Happy Like This hits a nerve, vital and bewitching "because of its suggestion that there is no universal language, none at all, that even the language of desperation is particular and private.”—Foreword Reviews, starred review

FGLA

“Wurzbacher dives into the lives of women in this brilliant collection, examining the ways they live and relate to each other while harboring their own secrets and feelings. Her lyrical prose and unflinchingly confrontational voice are powerful and captivating.”—Booklist, starred review