And Yet They Were Happy

by Helen Phillips

Overview

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD longlist nominee, Helen Phillips's debut novel, And Yet They Were Happy is "A gallery of marvels."

A young couple comes of age in a surreal world of apocalypse, delight, longing, and tenderness.

 "Brilliant miniatures. . . . Like the fables of Calvino, Millhauser, or W.S. Merwin. . . . Beautifully blends short story and prose poem. . . . Mermaids, subways, floods, cucumbers, magicians. . . .The book is a gallery of marvels. Phillips guides us through the 'Hall of Nostalgia For Things We Have Never Seen,' 'the factory where the virgins are made,' and 'the Anne Frank School for Expectant Mothers.' A depressed Noah admits he 'didn't get them all,' a wife guesses which of two identical men is her husband, a regime orders citizens to grow raspberries on windowsills. [Helen Phillips'] quietly elegant sentences are as clear as spring water, haunting as our own childhood memories."—Michael Dirda

"A deeply interesting mind is at work in these wry, lyrical stories. Phillips exploits the duality of our nature to create a timeless and most engaging collection."—Amy Hempel

"Haunted and lyrical and edible all at once."—Rivka Galchen

A young couple sets out to build a life together in an unstable world haunted by monsters, plagued by disasters, full of longing—but also one of transformation, wonder, and delight, peopled by the likes of Noah, Bob Dylan, the Virgin Mary, and Anne Frank. Hovering between reality and fantasy, whimsy and darkness, these linked fables describe a universe both surreal and familiar.

Helen Phillips received a 2009 Rona Jaffe Writer's Award, 2009 Meridian Editors' Prize, and 2008 Italo Calvino Fabulist Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and two anthologies. She holds degrees from Yale Universityand Brooklyn College, and teaches creative writing at Brooklyn College.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948585576
Publisher:	Leapfrog Press
Publication date:	01/31/2023
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	1,084,951
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Helen Phillips received a 2009 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, the 2009 Meridian Editors’ Prize, and the 2008 Italo Calvino Fabulist Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in Mississippi Review and Salt Hill Journal, among others, and in the anthologies American Fiction: The Best Previously Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Authors and The Hotel St. George Infinitely Expanding Library of New Fabulist Fiction. Helen is a graduate of Yale and Brooklyn College’s MFA programs. She teaches creative writing at Brooklyn College.

Editorial Reviews

Milestones—emotional, familial, biblical—feature heavily in Phillips's imaginative debut. The stories are organized around themes—floods, fights, punishments, "the Helens"—and embark on marvelous flights of character and metaphor: in "flood #2" as the waters are rising, a despairing Noah walks into a bar, muttering, "I didn't get them all," while in "fight #2," a battling couple repeatedly take on bizarre transformations, he, for instance, into a rainstorm and she into a fire. The narrator of "fight #5" invites a statue of the Virgin Mary to a cup of tea, only to feel sharp disappointment at Mary's remarks regarding the narrator's emotional needs. The "far-flung family" episodes consist of an anecdote about ancestors building a covered wagon and heading west, and one about the king's daughter who has married "the clever yet dirty craftsman." "The envies" concerns the jealousy of two sisters of "The girls in Maxfield Parish paintings," while "mistake #5" compels the narrator to find Santa, only to be rebuffed by the bitter old man. Mothers, weddings, and monsters are all treated with irreverence in this cunning work that winks at reality as it carves out its niche deep in fable territory. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"[Helen] Phillips' brashly experimental debut novel charts via linked fables the course of a young couple who fall in love, survive many floods, get married, have fights, make mistakes, and create a family—the whole shebang revealed in completely surreal yet oddly everyday prose."—Elle

"Surreal miniaturist Helen Phillips’s debut collection, And Yet They Were Happy, is full of gems."—Vanity Fair

From the Publisher

The story of the world unfolds in bursts of imagination, tied together with the flavor and thematic structure of fables.

The collection is made up entirely of two-page short stories, clumped together by theme. The first, "The Floods," introduces the end of the world by water, starting with a blowout party to which everyone's invited, and ending with a Snow Whiteinspired rumor that all the apples have been poisoned. "We hear of babies born with traces of twenty-seven poisons in their umbilical cords," Phillips writes. "We sit in the kitchen, eating nothing." It's a world where the original Eve and Noah stroll in deep conversation, where a bitchy Bob Dylan helps with the grocery shopping, where our narrator walks all the way to the North Pole to find its most famous resident, only to be insulted for her efforts. There's quite a lot of humor in these stories, although it's very dark comedy indeed. And there's a lovely bit of universality to certain sections, some of the best being themes that examine fights, failures, mistakes and punishments. In the middle, between "The Floods" and "The Apocalypses," Phillips dwells on the cycles of family with a section that shines a light on the journey from bride to mother to the raising of offspring. Others are disturbing, portraying hauntings, monsters and other fantasies in ways that have to be read, and not described. Phillips' unique worldview and clarity of language make every story a treat, be it miniature portraits of Anne Frank or Charlie Chaplin, or a sad instructional manual about how to rid oneself of all possessions.

A literary reflection to The Magnetic Fields' album 69 Love Songs.

Kirkus Reviews