The Happiest People in the World
Language: English
Published by Algonquin Books, 2014
- Hardcover
- Used
Seller: Bay State Book Company, North Smithfield, RI, U.S.A.Bay State Book Company
AbeBooks seller since January 23, 2023
Condition: Used - Good
£ 4.27
Quantity: 1 available
Add to basketItem description from seller
The book is in good condition with all pages and cover intact, including the dust jacket if originally issued. The spine may show light wear. Pages may contain some notes or highlighting, and there might be a "From the library of" label. Boxed set packaging, shrink wrap, or included media like CDs may be missing.
Seller Inventory # BSM.1C766
- Title
- The Happiest People in the World
- Author
- Clarke, Brock
- Publisher
- Algonquin Books
- Publication year
- 2014
- Condition
- good
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 1616201118
- ISBN 13
- 9781616201111
“This madcap adventure mixes small-town teachers, barkeeps, teenagers, and fry-cooks with international spies, terrorists, and political refugees. But it is the writing itself that is the true star here, as Clarke delves deep into the hidden and mixed emotions we carry for the ones we love, turning out sentence after sentence that will make you stop to admire its clear, crisp daring and perfect delivery. Yes! I thought, as I read these pages. That’s how you write a good book.” —Hannah Tinti, author The Good Thief
Take the format of a spy thriller, shape it around real-life incidents involving international terrorism, leaven it with dark, dry humor, toss in a love rectangle, give everybody a gun, and let everything play out in the outer reaches of upstate New York—there you have an idea of Brock Clarke’s new novel, The Happiest People in the World.
Who are “the happiest people in the world”? Theoretically, it’s all the people who live in Denmark, the country that gave the world Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and the open-face sandwich. But Denmark is also where some political cartoonists got into very unhappy trouble when they attempted to depict Muhammad in their drawings, which prompted protests, arson, and even assassination attempts.
Imagine, then, that one of those cartoonists, given protection through the CIA, is relocated to a small town in upstate New York where he is given a job as a high school guidance counselor. Once there, he manages to fall in love with the wife of the high school principal, who himself is trying to get over the effects of a misguided love affair with the very CIA agent who sent the cartoonist to him. Imagine also that virtually every other person in this tiny town is a CIA operative.
The result is a darkly funny tale of paranoia and the all-American obsession with security and the conspiracies that threaten it, written in a tone that is simultaneously filled with wonder and anger in almost equal parts.
"Synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
From the Back Cover
“This novel, good lord, is his best one yet. Brock Clarke portrays, with terrifying accuracy, the lives of people who constantly ruin things without ever quite understanding why or how, which eventually gives way to a strange kind of invulnerability. There is no writer who does this better than he does, creating that wonderful mixture of unexpected, sharp comedy and genuine empathy. The Danes may be the happiest people in the world, but you can easily join those ranks simply by reading this amazing book.” —Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang
“If the literary category of ‘mordant fable’ exists at all, it may be because Brock Clarke invented it. The Happiest People in the World is everything we fans have come to love from a Clarke novel: playful and deliriously skewed and somehow balancing between genuinely great-hearted and gloriously weird.” —Lauren Groff, author of Arcadia
“Brock Clarke’s hilarious new novel starts out in rural Denmark, then takes us someplace really foreign and utterly weird: upstate New York. The parallel universe Clarke creates there is both our world and not, and like his baffled, yearning characters, we navigate it with surprise and wonder.” —Richard Russo, author of Elsewhere
“Murder, arson, adultery, drugging and drinking, cruel politics--reading a book crammed with such activities can make the timid and yearning among us feel like the happiest people in the world.” —Edith Pearlman, auhor of Binocular Vision
“Like no other writer in contemporary American literature, Brock Clarke has a way of looking at us, I mean looking straight at us--warts, lots of warts, and beauty and hypocrisy and love, too, the gamut. And he’s done it again in his brilliant The Happiest People in the World . . . I for one am grateful he’s out there—watching our every move.” —Peter Orner, author of Esther Stories
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Bay State Book Company
North Smithfield, RI, U.S.A.
AbeBooks seller since January 23, 2023
Shipping rates within U.S.A.
| Item | 4 to 11 business days | 4 to 10 business days |
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We are a local book store that specializes in used books. Our delivery is quick. Same day shipping most of the time and most books arrive within 5 days or ordering.
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Bay State Book Company LLC
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