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Years after escaping her unbearable artworld friends in New York for a new life in London, an unnamed writer finds herself back on the Lower East Side attending a dinner party hosted by Eugene and Nicole - an artist-curator couple - and attended by their pretentious circle. It''s the evening after the funeral of their mutual friend, a failed actress, and if the narrator once loved and admired Eugene and Nicole and their important friends, she now despises them all. Most of all, however, she despises herself for being lured back to this cavernous apartment, to this hollow, bourgeois social set, for a dinner party that isn''t even being thrown in their deceased friend''s honour, but in the honour of an up-and-coming actress who is by now several hours late. As the guests sip at their drinks and await the actress''s arrival, they are unaware that the narrator, from her vantage point in the corner seat of a white sofa, is silently and mercilessly eviscerating them and everything they stand for. And when the guest of honour finally does arrive, she sets in motion a catastrophic end to the evening, laying bare the hypocritical decadence of the hosts'' vacuous little lives. Vicious, hilarious, propulsive, and at times unexpectedly tender, Happiness and Love is scintillating in its magnificent cruelty and its monstrous, absurd humanity too.
About the author
Zoe Dubno is a writer from Manhattan who lives in New York and London. She has an MFA from Rutgers University, Newark. Her fiction has appeared in Granta.
