The Year of Perfect Happiness

The sharp-witted stories in Becky Adnot-Haynes’s debut collection explore the secret lives of people-how they deal with the parts of themselves that they choose not to share with their closest confidants-and with the world. A pole-vaulter practices his sport only before dawn. A recently divorced woman signs up for a hallucinogenic drug excursion in the Arizona desert. An uncertain girlfriend goes out into the world wearing a false pregnancy belly.

In The Year of Perfect Happiness, the universe is recognizable but slightly askew, a world whose corners can be peeled back to reveal the strange and often comic outcomes of acting out your most self-destructive desires.