Happy All the Time (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

Laurie Colwin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307474402 ISBN 13: 9780307474407

Publisher: VintageContemporaries, 2010

Synopsis

"A luminous telling of two modern romances, a book that lingers sweetly and hilariously in the memory." --Dallas Morning News

Guido and Vincent are childhood best friends--third cousins, really--living in Cambridge and dreaming about their futures. Guido plans to write poetry while Vincent feels confident he will win a Nobel prize for physics. When Guido spots Holly while exiting a museum, he can immediately sense that she will be quirky, difficult, and hard to live with. He loves her on sight. Vincent, open-minded and cheerful, meets Misty at work. Though she is a bored and misanthropic brunette, he finds himself desperate to know her.

Through courtship, jealousy, estrangement, and other perils, Happy All the Time follows four sane, intelligent, and good-intentioned people who manage to find love in spite of themselves.

About this title

Review:

"A wise, bighearted book by a wise, bighearted writer. A deft and funny one, too." --The Washington Post

"A luminous telling of two modern romances, a book that lingers sweetly and hilariously in the memory." --Dallas Morning News

"Abounds in good lines, aphorisms, advice to both the loved and the lovelorn." --The New York Times

"An elegant, fresh, funny tale of four people in love.... There's electricity here... pure delight." --Village Voice

"A pleasure.... Endless surprises and ultimately boundless joy.... It would be difficult not to enjoy it all!" --The New Yorker
"Colwin's view of the world is comic with a subtle sense of sadness, and her love for even her most intractable characters does not keep her from laughing at their expense." --The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)

"[Laurie Colwin] handles feeling as cunningly as Ann Beattie and Frederick Barthelme handle numbness." --Los Angeles Times

"If Laurie Colwin were an artist instead of a writer, she would be a maker of those small, delicious drawings dropped into the text of The New Yorker. . . . She is a master of lovely incidentals--the curve of the belly of a pitcher, the color of a blue Staffordshire plate, the comfort of 'nursery' food on cold days." --Christian Science Monitor

"Colwin is ingenious, comedic, and spirited." --The Boston Globe

"[Colwin's] novels . . . have great charm--a charm that comes from a calm, witty and observant world view and her engaging writing style. She describes normal life with normal people; she writes about love, relationships and families. She illuminates modern urban romance. She looks at the way husbands and wives, brothers and sisters--and, almost inevitably in a Colwin novel, extramarital lovers--deal with each other. It might be boring if not for the acuteness of her insight." --Buffalo News

"A truly wonderful writer." --The Orlando Sentinel

"Colwin writes with such sunny skill, and such tireless enthusiasm." --Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review

"The successor to Dorothy Parker and Dawn Powell." --Roger Friedman

"A writer of originality and vision." --San Francisco Chronicle

About the Author:

Laurie Colwin is the author of five novels--Happy All the Time; Family Happiness; Goodbye Without Leaving; A Big Storm Knocked It Over; and Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object--three collections of short stories--Passion and Affect; The Lone Pilgrim; and Another Marvelous Thing--and two collections of essays, Home Cooking and More Home Cooking. Colwin died in 1992.

About this edition

• Publisher: VintageContemporaries
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0307474402
• ISBN 13: 9780307474407
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224