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    There Is Happiness: New and Selected Stories
    There Is Happiness: New and Selected Stories
    There Is Happiness: New and Selected Stories
    Audiobook10 hours

    There Is Happiness: New and Selected Stories

    Written by Brad Watson and Joy Williams

    Narrated by John McLain

    ()

    About this audiobook

    "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is the deserving page," Joy Williams writes in her introduction to this selection of Brad Watson's published and unpublished stories: "excellent, assured, funny, startling, heartbreaking, wild," full of "freakish flair" and "melancholy realism."



    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 is a theme, as is young love and its disillusionment, as are strange neighbors 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, 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 underrecognized literary genius.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJul 16, 2024
    ISBN9798855549966
    There Is Happiness: New and Selected Stories
    Author

    Brad Watson

    Brad Watson teaches creative writing at the University of Wyoming, Laramie. His first collection, Last Days of the Dog-Men, won the Sue Kaufman Award for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; his first novel, The Heaven of Mercury, was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 2002, and his second story collection Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. His book Miss Jane is based on his own Great Aunt, Miss Jane Chisolm.

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