Happiness and Love
A wild, propulsive, New York art world satire unfolding over one disastrous dinner party
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- $139.00
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- $139.00
Descripción editorial
The funny, propulsive new novel about hating your friends, hating what they bring out in you, hating how you pander to them, the perfect satirical summer read for fans of Emma Cline, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Ottessa Moshfegh.
A LitHub most anticipated book of 2025
‘Exceptionally funny and entertaining’ Katy Hessel, bestselling author of The Story of Art Without Men
‘A gorgeous book on being a hater, and I inhaled this in one sitting’ Stylist
Years after escaping her unbearable artworld friends in New York for a new life in London, an unnamed writer finds herself once more at their dinner table for a single, hideous evening.
It’s the day after the funeral of their mutual friend, a failed actress and – Eugene and Nicole, an artist-curator couple – are hosting a dinner party. If the narrator once loved and admired the couple 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, the narrator, from her vantage point in the corner seat of a white sofa entertains herself - and us - with a silent, tender, merciless takedown.
A satire about friendship, capitalism, culture, and art, Happiness and Love is the razor-sharp new novel from an exciting literary voice.
‘Bracing and funny and fiercely clever’ Orlando Whitfield, Nero-award listed author of All that Glitters
‘An ecstatic performance of heightened perception’ Chris Kraus, bestselling author of I Love Dick
‘Zeitgeist and timeless, cynical but not soulless. Fabulous!’ Melissa Broder, author of Milk Fed and The Pisces
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A young and jaded writer skewers her fellow guests at a decadent dinner party in this sharp and satirical debut from Dubno. The unnamed narrator is back in New York City after spending five years in Europe, where she'd moved after growing tired of her status-obsessed friends. She's stopped on the street by one of them, an artist named Eugene who steals other people's ideas. He invites her to dinner in his palatial loft on the Bowery, which he shares with his curator wife. A coterie of young creatives gather at the loft, a "cathedral of modernist rococo," where Eugene's drunken chauvinism emboldens Alexander, a virtue-signaling fake-feminist novelist, to spar with the guest of honor, a Hollywood ingenue, over her director's sexist gender politics. The recent death of the group's mutual friend—a tender-hearted "almost-actress"—looms over the evening, evoking Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters. Dubno updates Bernhard's drawing-room fiction with a shiny and pleasurable modern gloss, shot through with incisive class commentary ("beluga caviar on marcelled potato chips, the kitsch, appetizing specialty de la maison of marrying high and low"). Just as the narrator's excoriation begins to wear thin, she breaks the tension with wry self-deprecation on her "sybarite" self. Readers will devour this in one gulp. Agents: Mollie Glick and Julie Flanagan, CAA.
