Are You Happy? Stories

Nine exquisite stories that explore class, desire, identity, and the specter of violence that looms daily over women and the LGBTQ+ community. 

An aspiring veterinarian survives a plane crash and starts life over in California. A woman mourns the loss of her childhood friend’s innocence and rethinks justice. A queer teacher's sense of safety in the classroom is destroyed. With settings ranging from small-town Minnesota to New Mexico, from bars and bedrooms to a furniture store and a community college, Are You Happy? casts a spotlight on people who try—and often fail—to make peace with their pasts while navigating their present relationships and notions of self. In prose that is evocative and restrained, unpredictable and masterful, Lori Ostlund offers a darkly humorous and compassionate examination of America’s preoccupation with loneliness, happiness, guns, and violence.

Lori Ostlund is the author of the story collection, The Bigness of the World, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for First Fiction, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and was a Lamda finalist. Her second book, a novel, After the Parade, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Ferro-Grumley Award, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories, and literary journals such as New England Review, The Kenyon Review, and ZYZZYVA. Lori is the series editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.