There is happiness : new and selected stories / Brad Watson ; foreword by Joy Williams.
Material type:![Text](/opac-tmpl/lib/famfamfam/BK.png)
- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9781324076421
- 1324076429
Item type | Current library | Collection | Shelving location | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adult Book | Phillipsburg Free Public Library | Adult Fiction | New Books | FIC WATSON | Available | 36748002563148 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
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and unabashedly vulnerable, There Is Happiness brings together Brad Watson's most celebrated pieces alongside new, unpublished works.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.
A posthumous collection of beloved and never-before-read stories from a titan of contemporary Southern fiction.
"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deserving page," Joy Williams writes in her introduction to this astonishing selection of Brad Watson's published and unpublished stories: "excellent, assured, funny, startling, heartbreaking, wild," full of "freakish flair" and "melancholy realism" -- stories that give us a "glimpse" of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 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." -- Provided by publisher.