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“Brock Clarke’s hilarious new novel starts out in rural Denmark, then takes us someplace really foreign and utterly weird: upstate New York. The parallel universe Clarke creates there is both our world and not, and like his baffled, yearning characters, we navigate it with surprise and wonder.”
— Richard Russo, New York Times bestselling author of The Old Cape Magic
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“A literary first: a book that feels like the love child of Saul Bellow and Hogan’s Heroes, full of authorial
cartwheels of comedy and profundity.”
— GQ
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“[A] dark and funny satire…The
ridiculous confusion of infidelities, secret identities, and double-crosses
that plays out reflects the absurdity of any country obsessed with spying on
its own people.”
— Wall Street Journal
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“[Clarke has] success in dreaming
up oddball originals that have instant appeal.”
— New York Times
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“It’s like what might have come to
be had the Coen brothers collaborated with the Three Stooges: an energetic
exercise in the incompatible mediums of dark humor and slapstick, in which
nobody ever really knows what the hell is going on, the reader included…Clarke’s
work can be seen as a continuing investigation into American haplessness; his
characters are forever powerless against their own worst impulses and against
the vicissitudes of fate.”
— New York Times Book Review
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“A whiz-bang spy satire bundled in an edgy tale of redemption…Clarke dazzles with a dizzying study in extremes, cruising at warp speed between bleak and optimistic, laugh-out-loud funny and unbearable sadness. His comedy of errors is impossible to put down.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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“The funniest and smartest novel I have read in years. ‘Yes!’ I thought, as I read these pages. ‘That’s how you write a good book.’”
— Hannah Tinti, author The Good Thief
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“Murder, arson, adultery, drugging and drinking, cruel politics—reading a book crammed with such activities can make the timid and yearning among us feel like the happiest people in the world.”
— Edith Pearlman, author of Binocular Vision
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“If the literary category of ‘mordant fable’ exists at all, it may be because Brock Clarke invented it. The Happiest People in the World is everything we fans have come to love from a Clarke novel: playful and deliriously skewed, and somehow balancing between genuinely great-hearted and gloriously weird.”
— Lauren Groff, author of Arcadia
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“Like no other writer in contemporary American literature, Brock Clarke has a way of looking at us, I mean looking straight at us—warts, lots of warts, and beauty and hypocrisy and love, too, the gamut. And he’s done it again in this brilliant The Happiest People in the World, a novel that is as hilarious and thought-provoking as it is ultimately, deadly, deadly serious. I for one am grateful he’s out there—watching our every move.”
— Peter Orner, author of Esther Stories
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“Adam Black’s narration is like
having a high-energy drink after a couple of espressos. His rapid, angst-ridden
pace captures the bewilderment Jens, newly christened Henry Larsen, feels when
he’s installed as a high school guidance counselor in Broomeville, New York.
Talk about culture shock! In this novel filled with wonderfully bizarre
characters, Shakespearean dilemmas, and hilarious, if bloody, outcomes, Black’s
wicked narration and Brock Clarke’s no-holds-barred wackiness prove
laugh-out-loud funny.”
— AudioFile