A01=Brad Watson
A24=Joy Williams
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
american south
anger
Author_Brad Watson
automatic-update
brad watson
Category1=Fiction
Category=FA
Category=FBA
Category=FBC
Category=FC
Category=FYB
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_anthologies-novellas-short-stories
eq_bestseller
eq_classics
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain
gothic
grieving
horror
humor
Language_English
loss
love
mississippi
natural world
PA=Available
pastoral
posthumous
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
rural
softlaunch
stories
Product details
- ISBN 9781324076421
- Weight: 573g
- Dimensions: 163 x 236mm
- Publication Date: 16 Jul 2024
- Publisher: WW Norton & Co
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
“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deserving page,” Joy Williams writes in her introduction to this astonishing selection of Brad Watson’s published and unpublished stories: “excellent, assured, funny, startling, heartbreaking, wild", full of “freakish flair” and “melancholy realism”—stories that give us a “glimpse” of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. Male meltdown, carrying with it the possibility of being saved by Dolly Parton or some other woman or maybe by animal friends, is a theme, as is young love and its disillusionment, as are strange neighbours who cannot be understood. A leopard that consumes its zookeeper, pronghorn antelope tenderly transporting the poop of their young, insufferably articulate birds and restless, tolerant dogs—this is also eco-fiction of a very peculiar sort, in which nature reassures, transcends and finally escapes judging or being judged by us.
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.
