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Let's All Be Happy Today is the debut short story collection of Joel Allegretti, featuring seventeen lurid snapshots of human existence, in all its banal glory. Allegretti's cutting wit and scathing observations about daily life and the torments of various "average joes" speak effortlessly to that Charlie Chaplin adage, "Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot."
About the author
Joel Allegretti is the author of five previous poetry collections and a novella, Our Dolphin (Thrice Publishing, 2016). His second book of poetry, Father Silicon (The Poet's Press, 2006), was selected by The Kansas City Star as one of 100 Noteworthy Books of 2006.
He is the editor of Rabbit Ears: TV Poems (NYQ Books, 2015), the first anthology of poetry about the mass medium.
Allegretti has published his poems in The New York Quarterly, Barrow Street, Smartish Pace, PANK, and many other national journals, as well as in journals published in Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and India.
His short stories have appeared in The MacGuffin, The Adroit Journal, and Thrice Fiction, among other literary journals. His performance texts and theater pieces have been staged at La MaMa, Medicine Show Theater, the Cornelia Street Café, and SideWalk Café, all in New York. He was co-editor of "Dear Yoko: A Tribute to Yoko Ono," a special digital issue of Nerve Lantern: Axon of Performance Literature, a journal of performance texts and writings about performance.
He is represented in more than two-dozen anthologies. Allegretti wrote the texts for three song cycles by Frank Ezra Levy, whose work is released on Naxos American Classics. He is a member of the Academy of American Poets and ASCAP.
