Double Happiness
Stories
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Short stories about the universal need to be loved, from "a quietly gorgeous writer" (The New York Times Book Review).
In "Pelican Song," a thirty-year-old modern dancer who moonlights as a movie ticket taker visits her parent's picturesque home to discover that her stepfather has begun mistreating her too-accommodating mother. "Horse" follows maladjusted honeymooners in Atlantic City whose romantic weekend is saved from emotional catastrophe. A holiday in New York City turns from shopping sprees to a young girl's sharp discovery of her father's secret life in "Rome."
With an elegant blend of humor and pathos, Mary-Beth Hughes captures the turning points in relationships that make us wonder how well we really know those we love. Double Happiness is a revealing meditation on the fragility of contentment and the lengths we must go to in order to sustain it, and "[an] intensely moving collection" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
"Excellent." —The New Yorker
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The reader eagerly waits for the hammer to fall in these 11 wickedly drawn stories by the author of Wavemaker II. Hughes s characters are skillfully delineated modern types, caught off-guard and vulnerable, such as Raymond, the glib, successful writer of The Aces, who, while in Rome with his pregnant wife, runs into a former fling that ended badly: Kind of comic, really, but then he remembered that maybe he d been a bit of a bastard. In the marvelously rueful Blue Grass, the young woman narrator senses that her longtime lover is becoming less attracted to her, and an unlikely triangle forms as the narrator becomes attracted to her just-buried sister s boyfriend. Each of the tales opens out to surprising plot twists, such as in Guidance, which recounts the surreal adventures of a model who had been living the high life in Tokyo before marrying an older, rich American bad guy, becoming pregnant with twins, and essentially being imprisoned within a walled compound in Jakarta. The resonant title story, set in the aftermath of 9/11 as a mother comes to terms with the loss of her son, caps this intensely moving collection.
