Happiness and Love

One of Vogue’s Best Books of the Year “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.” —The Spectator Following a young woman over the course of one outrageous and insufferable downtown dinner party at the home of her estranged best friends—an artist and curator couple, whom she now realizes stands for everything she detests—Happiness and Love is a “deliciously scathing” (Vogue UK) debut novel about brazen materialism, self-obsession, and the empty careerism of so-called cultural elites. Delivered in a single hilarious, brutal paragraph, this is the story of an evening that slowly self-destructs, as the guests sip orange wine and await the arrival of a newly famous actress. When the guest of honor finally does arrive, she sets in motion a disastrous end to the night, laying bare the depravity and decadence of the hosts’ empty little lives—a hollowness that the narrator herself knows all too well.

Zoe Dubno is a writer from New York. She attended Oberlin College and has an MFA from Rutgers University, Newark. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The Nation, Vogue, and elsewhere. Happiness and Love is her first novel.