Heaven is Small
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Award-winning author and poet Emily Schultz offers an immensely readable, funny, and sharp novel about a man who works for a Harlequin-like publisher, and gradually discovers that he has arrived in "heaven." Like Will Ferguson's international bestseller, Happiness, Heaven is Small is a smart, satirical novel from one of our best.
Heaven is Small is the funny, layered, startling, and profound story of Gordon Small, a degree-clutching slacker and failed fiction writer. Gordon is also, we discover in the first paragraph, recently deceased - although this is "an event he failed to notice." When Gordon finds himself suddenly employed at the Heaven Book Company, the world's largest romance publisher, he begins to notice that something is odd: his routines within the company's walls, though familiar in some respects, have taken on a strange cast - stranger than is usual in the average suburban office.
With sly deadpan humour, brilliant insight into the human condition, and exceptionally beautiful writing, Schultz explores what it means to be truly alive only after you're dead.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When failed writer and divorc e Gordon Small accepts a job at Heaven Book Company as a proofreader, he needs some time to get used to the anonymous bureaucracy of the massive romance publishing house. What he gradually discovers, though, is that he's dead, as is every employee of Heaven. When Gordon comes to terms with his purgatorial state, he decides to disrupt Heaven, bring self-awareness to his colleagues, reach out to his estranged wife, and revitalize his writing career. In the process, his actions threaten to tear down the boundaries between life and the afterlife and, in the process, Schultz redefines the romance genre. Schultz's latest is a satire of office life, romance novels, and afterlife narratives. She has accomplished something quite remarkable here, deftly juggling all this social commentary and a rather blandly sympathetic protagonist with a sharp command of language.
