The Great Happiness: Stories and Comics

By M.A.C. Farrant

A collection of 60-plus miniature fictions riffing on the theme of happiness, written as an antidote to the all-pervasive climate of doom that we are living through. This is fiction that is meant to delight; it's good to be alive and we often forget that. Forget to laugh, forget to love, forget the possibility of joyous moments - as we continue to be overwhelmed and overtaken by bad news. If anything is going to get us through these frightening times, it's this flip side. Many of the miniatures in The Great Happiness are narratives with a twist, ones that radiate 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. The miniatures in The Great Happiness are "fictions that think," each one a combination of narrative, prose poem and joke (in varying degrees), and always heeding Charles Simic's dictum to keep it brief and "tell us everything."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1772012211
• ISBN13: 9781772012217
• Release Date: May 2019
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 4.9" x 8.4"