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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Marie Arendt |
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THERE IS HAPPINESS
New and Selected Stories
A posthumous collection of beloved and never-before-read stories from a titan of contemporary Southern fiction.
Darkly comedic, lyrically mighty, and unabashedly vulnerable, There Is Happiness brings together Brad Watson's most celebrated pieces alongside new, unpublished works.
Watson's characters - often boys and brothers, fathers and sons - are shaped by oddities of nature, while nature itself communicates loudly. In these pages, dogs most certainly have their day, a one-eyed woman swims the breaststroke, and Dolly Parton holds the key to a convict's salvation. Spouses grow apart while bitter landlords bang on the ceiling to quiet the creaking bedframe upstairs. Grotesque twins exercise in tandem, and two men drink to forget their dead wives (though "dead" is a relative term).
Roller-coastering from the mournful to the hilarious (sometimes in the same paragraph) and steeped in both the Southern gothic tradition and a universal literature of the tragic, the beautiful, and the absurd, Watson's stories waltz masterfully with surprising, lovely, and strange melancholy, infused with wit and bound by authenticity.
Brad Watson (19552020) was the National Book Award-shortlisted author of Last Days of the Dog Men, The Heaven of Mercury, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, and Miss Jane. His work has been recognized by the short list and long list of the National Book Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Great Lakes New Writers Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Fiction (twice), the Southern Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, a National Endowment of the Arts Grant in Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harper Lee Award, and the Award in Letters granted by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He taught creative writing at Harvard University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Wyoming, Laramie. Originally from Mississippi, at the time of his death he was a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Wyoming.
Watson's characters - often boys and brothers, fathers and sons - are shaped by oddities of nature, while nature itself communicates loudly. In these pages, dogs most certainly have their day, a one-eyed woman swims the breaststroke, and Dolly Parton holds the key to a convict's salvation. Spouses grow apart while bitter landlords bang on the ceiling to quiet the creaking bedframe upstairs. Grotesque twins exercise in tandem, and two men drink to forget their dead wives (though "dead" is a relative term).
Roller-coastering from the mournful to the hilarious (sometimes in the same paragraph) and steeped in both the Southern gothic tradition and a universal literature of the tragic, the beautiful, and the absurd, Watson's stories waltz masterfully with surprising, lovely, and strange melancholy, infused with wit and bound by authenticity.
Brad Watson (19552020) was the National Book Award-shortlisted author of Last Days of the Dog Men, The Heaven of Mercury, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, and Miss Jane. His work has been recognized by the short list and long list of the National Book Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Great Lakes New Writers Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Fiction (twice), the Southern Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, a National Endowment of the Arts Grant in Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harper Lee Award, and the Award in Letters granted by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He taught creative writing at Harvard University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Wyoming, Laramie. Originally from Mississippi, at the time of his death he was a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Wyoming.
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Book
Published 2024-07-16 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA) |