The great happiness

"If anything is going to get us through these frightening times, it's this fiction meant to delight from the writer known as "the bizarre Alice Munro." A collection of sixty-plus miniature fictions riffing on the theme of happiness, The Great Happiness is an antidote to the all-pervasive climate of doom we are living through. We often forget that it's good to be alive: forget to laugh, forget to love, forget the possibility of joyous moments. Many of the book's miniatures are narratives with a twist, radiating from a particular avenue in a particular West Coast town. Others are imaginative flights, such as the recently dead experimental novelist "sitting in" on the obituary-writing session convened by her husband, or the woman who rescues an Atlantic lobster from Save-On-Foods and ships it to P.E.I. to be released back into the ocean. These miniatures are "fictions that think," each one a combination of narrative, prose poem, and joke, always heeding Charles Simic's dictum to keep it brief and "tell us everything.""--