Happiness and Love

Exceptionally funny and entertaining.

Katy Hessel, author of The Story of Art Without Men

Zoe Dubno examines character and human relations in the same way an art critic looks at a painting. Digging deeper and deeper into the thoughts behind thoughts, feelings behind feelings and questioning everything, Happiness and Love is an ecstatic performance of heightened perception.

Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick

In Happiness and Love, Zoe Dubno viciously and delightfully skewers the vapid people – the neo-bohemians of the social media age – who masquerade their privilege as creativity. It is bracing and funny and fiercely clever, a first novel of extraordinary confidence and profoundly entertaining wickedness.

Orlando Whitfield, Nero-award listed author of All that Glitters

I loved this astute and hilarious skewering of New York’s psuedy cultural elite. Intelligent, relentless, nasty and fun, Happiness and Love is energising, vital and a total joy to read.

Francesca Reece, author of Voyeur

A master class in irony, wit and storytelling, Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love is one of the most incisive and entertaining novels I’ve read this year. In a style redolent of Thomas Bernhard but very much her own and zeroing in on a 21st century New York art monster milieu, she manages to capture in every sentence delicious truths about our era that a thousand news articles barely touch. A triumph!

John Keene, winner of the National Book Award

The pleasures of this book’s humanity are instant and lingering. The result is, strangely, you not only love the book, you actually end up liking yourself a good deal more.

James L. Brooks, creator of The Simpsons

Borrowing Thomas Bernhard's breakneck and largely break-free prose as a vehicle, Zoe Dubno sends the reader on an exhilarating, head-spinning tour of a downtown New York full of leeches and jackals and worse. Her nameless narrator is bug-eyed and sharp-nibbed and the result is utterly alive with her italicised contempt, splenetic wit, irate pathos, and - spoiler alert - transcendent charity.

Leo Robson, author of The Boys

Zoe Dubno has written a savage, whip-smart and genuinely hilarious take-down of New York’s culture production eco system — from art to magazine and book publishing to film and TV. And like the best work — form mirrors content as we journey into the twisted mind of a fascinating product of that very eco-system, tossed on a dark sea of delectable aspersions until we can’t tell who’s good, who’s bad and, most importantly, who’s a real artist.

Lexi Frieman, author of The Book of Ayn

Happiness and Love is a wildly intelligent debut that anatomizes our cultural affectations with wit and uncanny clarity. Formally daring, it upends our notions of aesthetic ambition, social performance, and maps the erosion of our collective sincerity — all while occupying the porous boundary between critique and complicity. I loved it.

Zain Khalid, author of Brother Alive, “5 Under 35” National Book Foundation honoree