Brad Watson There Is Happiness recensie, review en informatie boek met verhalen van de Amerikaanse schrijver van contemporary Southern fiction die in 2020 is overleden. Op 17 juli 2024 verschijnt bij Uitgeverij W.W. Norton het boek met new and selected stories van de uit de Verenigde Staten afkomstige schrijver Brad Watson. Hier lees je informatie over de inhoud van het boek, de schrijver en over de uitgave. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling verkrijgbaar of aangekondigd.
Brad Watson There Is Happiness recensie en review
- “If Raymond Carver and Flannery O’Conner had a one night stand-their spawn would be Brad Watson. His stories are as artful as they are unnerving. Watson renders the human experience with pathos and love. His work is singular, and essential in our understanding who we are and where we have come from. His early departure from this world leaves us aching for more.” (A.N. Homes, author of The Unfolding)
- “This vibrant collection… showcases the author’s wry humor and taste for the bizarre… It’s sure to satisfy fans and newcomers alike.” (Publshers Weekly)
There Is Happiness
New and Selected Stories
- Auteur: Brad Watson (Verenigde Staten)
- Soort boek: verhalen
- Taal: Engels
- Uitgever: W.W. Norton
- Verschijnt: 17 juli 2024
- Omvang: 304 pagina’s
- Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
- Prijs: $29.99
- Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris
Flaptekst boek met verhalen van Brad Watson
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deserving page,” Joy Williams writes in her introduction to this astonishing selection of Brad Watson’s published and unpublished stories: “excellent, assured, funny, startling, heartbreaking, wild,“ full of “freakish flair” and “melancholy realism”—stories that give us a “glimpse” of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.
Roller-coastering from the mournful to the comical (sometimes in the same paragraph), 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.
Brad Watson (24 juli 1955, Meridian, Mississippi – 8 juli 2020, Laramie, Wyoming) was the author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Heaven of Mercury and Miss Jane, and two collections of stories, Last Days of the Dog-Men and Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives. His work has been recognized by the short list and long list of the National Book Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Great Lakes New Writers Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Fiction (twice), the Southern Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, a National Endowment of the Arts Grant in Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harper Lee Award, and the Award in Letters granted by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He taught creative writing at Harvard University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Wyoming, Laramie.