Square Books will celebrate the last collected works of author Brad Watson with a reading of There Is Happiness: New and Selected Stories, a posthumous collection of Watson’s never-before-read stories, at Off Square Books on July 16 at 5:30 pm.
In her introduction of the book, Author Joy Williams calls Happiness “a generous portion of the work of a swiftly passing lifetime.”
Williams describes the book as “excellent, assured, funny, startling, heartbreaking, wild,” and full of “freakish flair and melancholy realism—stories that give us a glimpse of ourselves.”
Brad Watson was born in Meridian, Mississippi in 1955 and was the 2004-2005 John and Renee Grisham Writer In Residence at the University of Mississippi. Watson wrote two critically acclaimed novels, The Heaven of Mercury and Miss Jane, and two collections of stories, Last Days of the Dog-Men and Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives.
His work has been recognized by the short list and long list of the National Book Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Great Lakes New Writers Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Fiction (twice), the Southern Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, a National Endowment of the Arts Grant in Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harper Lee Award, and the Award in Letters granted by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He taught creative writing at Harvard University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Wyoming, Laramie.
Watson passed away at his Laramie, Wyoming home in 2020 at age 64.
From the publisher’s review of Happiness:
Brad Watson was a master of dark comedy, extraordinary lyricism, palling grotesquerie, and unabashed vulnerability; a sublime prose stylist whose novels and stories drew upon the fecundity and moodiness of the South. Male meltdown, carrying with it the possibility of being saved by Dolly Parton or some other woman or maybe by animal friends, is a theme, as is young love and its disillusionment, as are strange neighbors who cannot be understood. A leopard that consumes its zookeeper, pronghorn antelope tenderly transporting the poop of their young, insufferably articulate birds and restless, tolerant dogs—this is also eco-fiction of a very peculiar sort, in which nature reassures, transcends, and finally escapes judging or being judged by us.
Roller-coastering from the mournful to the comical (sometimes in the same paragraph), Watson’s work is both embedded in a literary heritage tied to place and at home in a universal literature of the absurd. His stories waltz with lovely and strange melancholy, infused with wit and astonishing beauty. There Is Happiness embodies the twisted hilarity and undeniable grace of an underrecognized literary genius.
