Happiness and Love

Rezensionen / Stimmen

Deliciously scathing . . . Judgemental yet self-aware, caustic yet warm, Dubno's book will have you yelping in recognition - either at the state of your own friendships (or depending on your lifestyle and bank balance) at the characters on the page. * Vogue * Zingy . . . Told in a single long , savage and hilarious paragraph, Happiness and Love can be gulped in one delicious go. * Financial Times * A gorgeous book on being a hater, and I inhaled this in one sitting. * Stylist * Breathless, damning, funny, elegiac . . . The achievement here is unquestionably substantial. Dubno has managed to write a work of high style that is also a document of real emotion. -- Madeline Cash * The London Magazine * Zeitgeist and timeless, cynical but not soulless, Dubno's propulsive debut is for lovers of Thomas Bernhard, art over theory, and anyone who has ever wondered "What the hell am I doing here?" Fabulous! * Melissa Broder, author of Milk Fed * Exceptionally funny and entertaining. * Katy Hessel, author of The Story of Art Without Men * Zoe Dubno examines character and human relations in the same way an art critic looks at a painting. Digging deeper and deeper into the thoughts behind thoughts, feelings behind feelings and questioning everything, Happiness and Love is an ecstatic performance of heightened perception. * Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick * In Happiness and Love, Zoe Dubno viciously and delightfully skewers the vapid people - the neo-bohemians of the social media age - who masquerade their privilege as creativity. It is bracing and funny and fiercely clever, a first novel of extraordinary confidence and profoundly entertaining wickedness. * Orlando Whitfield, Nero-award listed author of All that Glitters * I loved this astute and hilarious skewering of New York's psuedy cultural elite. Intelligent, relentless, nasty and fun, Happiness and Love is energising, vital and a total joy to read. * Francesca Reece, author of Voyeur * A master class in irony, wit and storytelling, Zoe Dubno's Happiness and Love is one of the most incisive and entertaining novels I've read this year. In a style redolent of Thomas Bernhard but very much her own and zeroing in on a 21st century New York art monster milieu, she manages to capture in every sentence delicious truths about our era that a thousand news articles barely touch. A triumph! * John Keene, winner of the National Book Award * The pleasures of this book's humanity are instant and lingering. The result is, strangely, you not only love the book, you actually end up liking yourself a good deal more. * James L. Brooks, creator of The Simpsons * Borrowing Thomas Bernhard's breakneck and largely break-free prose as a vehicle, Zoe Dubno sends the reader on an exhilarating, head-spinning tour of a downtown New York full of leeches and jackals and worse. Her nameless narrator is bug-eyed and sharp-nibbed and the result is utterly alive with her italicised contempt, splenetic wit, irate pathos, and - spoiler alert - transcendent charity. * Leo Robson, author of The Boys * Zoe Dubno has written a savage, whip-smart and genuinely hilarious take-down of New York's culture production eco system - from art to magazine and book publishing to film and TV. And like the best work - form mirrors content as we journey into the twisted mind of a fascinating product of that very eco-system, tossed on a dark sea of delectable aspersions until we can't tell who's good, who's bad and, most importantly, who's a real artist. * Lexi Frieman, author of The Book of Ayn * Happiness and Love is a wildly intelligent debut that anatomizes our cultural affectations with wit and uncanny clarity. Formally daring, it upends our notions of aesthetic ambition, social performance, and maps the erosion of our collective sincerity - all while occupying the porous boundary between critique and complicity. I loved it. * Zain Khalid, author of Brother Alive, "5 Under 35" National Book Foundation honoree * A single-paragraph diatribe in the tradition of Bernhard, Dubno's Happiness and Love turns disillusionment into an artistic rite of passage. Her voice is neurotic and laugh-out-loud mean, the narrator flinching at the sight of turmeric lattes and open relationships, weaponizing autofiction's confessional mode not toward self-glorification, but toward a demolition of the ecosystems that once made the narrator feel special. * Madeline Cash, author of Lost Lambs * Fun, clever and full of heart, Happiness and Love is the art world massacre we've been waiting for. * Stephanie LaCava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You * Happiness and Love is a delightful, breathless effusion of vitriol aimed at a degraded art world characterized by commercial goals, swiped ideas, and bad faith. Yet even as the narrator is spewing hatred - witty, fun-to-read acid opinions - toward her ex art world friends, she cannot hide from the reader that her disappointment comes from an idealistic and tender heart. Zoe Dubno is a marvelous, fresh, undeniable new voice. * Alice Elliott Dark, author of Fellowship Point * A scathing, sharp and cathartic chronicle of every thought you've ever had about the people you hate to love and love to hate. * Nicola Dinan, author of Disappoint Me * Irresistible... This is a scathing , very funny and ruthless takedown of pretentious boho millennials. * Big Issue * A blistering satire on friendship, capitalism, class, and culture, Happiness and Love is a smart, acerbic debut. * Dazed * Reading the novel is akin to spending time with a witty if merciless observer of other people's idiocies. There's something of a latter-day Holden Caulfield about the narrator . . . it possesses an enlivening, claustrophobic charge * James Cahill, Spectator *