A01=Brad Watson
american south
anger
Author_Brad Watson
Category=DS
Category=FBA
Category=FBC
Category=FYB
eq_anthologies-novellas-short-stories
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_classics
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
gothic
grieving
horror
humor
loss
love
mississippi
natural world
pastoral
posthumous
rural
short fiction
Product details
- ISBN 9781324123378
- Weight: 252g
- Dimensions: 140 x 211mm
- Publication Date: 21 Apr 2026
- Publisher: WW Norton & Co
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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“Here is a generous portion of the work of a swiftly passing lifetime. Bountiful is the deserving page,” Joy Williams writes in her introduction to this astonishing selection of Brad Watson’s published and unpublished stories: “excellent, assured, funny, startling, heartbreaking, wild,“ full of “freakish flair” and “melancholy realism”—stories that give us a “glimpse” of ourselves “so surprising, so varied yet unequivocal, so ruthlessly complete, that it does awaken us in some manner, if not protect or prepare us.”
Brad Watson was a master of dark comedy, extraordinary lyricism, appalling grotesquerie and unabashed vulnerability; a sublime prose stylist whose novels and stories drew upon the fecundity and moodiness of the South.
Roller-coastering from the mournful to the comical (sometimes in the same paragraph), Watson’s work is both embedded in a literary heritage tied to place and at home in a universal literature of the absurd. His stories waltz with lovely and strange melancholy, infused with wit and astonishing beauty. There Is Happiness embodies the twisted hilarity and undeniable grace of an under-recognised literary genius.
Brad Watson was the National Book Award shortlisted author of Last Days of the Dog Men, The Heaven of Mercury, and Miss Jane. Originally from Mississippi, at the time of his death he was a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Wyoming.
