Ashley Wurzbacher - HAPPY LIKE THIS

Ashley will be joined by Chris Cander.

The characters in Happy Like This are smart girls and professional women—social scientists, linguists, speech therapists, plant physiologists, dancers—who search for happiness in roles and relationships that are often unscripted or unconventional. In the midst of their ambivalence about marriage, monogamy, and motherhood and their struggles to accept and love their bodies, they look to other women for solidarity, stability, and validation. Sometimes they find it; sometimes they don’t. Spanning a wide range of distinct perspectives, voices, styles, and settings, the ten shimmering stories in Happy Like This offer deeply felt, often humorous meditations on the complexity of choice and the ambiguity of happiness.

Ashley Wurzbacher’s writing has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her short story collection, Happy Like This, won the 2019 John Simmons Short Fiction Award from the University of Iowa Press. She earned her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and received fellowship support from Inprint. She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and teaches creative writing at the University of Montevallo. https://ashleywurzbacher.com

Chris Cander is the award-winning author of three novels, including THE WEIGHT OF A PIANO, which The New York Times Book Review called "immense, intense and imaginative.