2024
First Published
4.03
Average Rating
299
Number of Pages
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and unabashedly vulnerable, There Is Happiness brings together Brad Watson’s most celebrated pieces alongside new, unpublished works.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.
Avg Rating
4.03
Number of Ratings
60
5 STARS
30%
4 STARS
45%
3 STARS
23%
2 STARS
2%
1 STARS
0%
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