A delightful collection of seventy miniature fictions and comics riffing on the theme of happiness, The Great Happiness offers a series of lively antidotes to the current climate of doom. Some of the book’s miniatures are narratives with a twist, others are imaginative flights, such as the recently dead experimental novelist “sitting in” on the obituary-writing session convened by her husband, or the woman who rescues an Atlantic lobster from her local Save-On-Foods and ships it to Prince Edward Island to be released back into the ocean. The miniatures of The Great Happiness are “fictions that think,” each one a combination of narrative, prose poem, and jest.
The Great Happiness is the third part in M.A.C. Farrant’s trilogy of miniature fiction published by Talonbooks, preceded by The World Afloat, winner of the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize, and The Days, nominated for the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize and the ReLit Award.