Happy Like This

Name: Happy Like This
Brand: Brilliance Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Ashley Wurzbacher
ISBN: 9781713587385

Author: Ashley Wurzbacher

Series: Iowa Short Fiction Award

Narrator: Jennifer Jill Araya

Unabridged: 8 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Brilliance Audio

Published: 09/07/2021

Categories: Fiction, Short Stories

Synopsis

The characters in Happy Like This are smart girls and professional women—social scientists, linguists, speech therapists, plant physiologists, dancers—who search for happiness in roles and relationships that are often unscripted or unconventional. In the midst of their ambivalence about marriage, monogamy, and motherhood and their struggles to accept and love their bodies, they look to other women for solidarity, stability, and validation. Sometimes they find it; sometimes they don’t. Spanning a wide range of distinct perspectives, voices, styles, and settings, the ten shimmering stories in Happy Like This offer deeply felt, often humorous meditations on the complexity of choice and the ambiguity of happiness.

About Ashley Wurzbacher

Ashley Wurzbacher’s writing has appeared in the Iowa Review, Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and teaches creative writing at the University of Montevallo.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Lolly K Dandeneau

via my blog: [URL not allowed] 'The rest of her life: looming, open-mouthed. She was heading straight for it on autopilot but couldn’t recall having chosen or engineered it.' This is an incredibly engaging debut collection of stories, which I devoured! My only complaint is it ende......more

Goodreads review by Aditi

Where do I begin? I absolutely loved this book. Each short story is a snapshot of life from a woman in a different stage of life, and dealing with a completely different set of challenges. Ashley Wurzbacher somehow makes each woman and her story entirely separate yet convincing. I was left wanting m......more

Goodreads review by Amie

I admired this collection very much, particularly its attention to subjects that I don't often see treated with deft nuance as often as I'd like: polyamory ("Happy Like That"), bisexuality ("Fake Mermaid"), and abortion ("Burden"), among other things. Wurzbacher's characters are complex, flawed, int......more

Quotes

"Wurzbacher...deploys her encyclopedic command of various ideas, regions, professions and lexicons with the authority of seasoned masters like Adam Johnson. This is a writer at the top of her game; but hopefully she's only just getting started." (The New York Times)

"Wurzbacher's incisive, polychromatic story collection centers on the dizzying complexities of female friendships: how they fray and mend over time and are often imbued with the intensity of love affairs." (Oprah Magazine)

"Wurzbacher dives into the lives of women in this brilliant collection, examining the ways they live and relate to each other while harboring their own secrets and feelings. Her lyrical prose and unflinchingly confrontational voice are powerful and captivating." (Booklist, starred review)