Happy Hour: Stories - Paperback

by Alison Baker (Author)

Welcome to HAPPY HOUR, Alison Baker's third collection of quirky, heart-breaking stories. With her trademark humor and distinctive opening lines, she drops us right into the lives of characters yearning for connection in a world they never expected to inhabit. An itinerant cosmetics salesman falls in love with a wilderness guide twenty years his junior. A physician falls in love with a faith healer. A young woman's life is utterly changed by her brother's traumatic brain injury. And a middle-aged daughter finds both grief and hilarity in her elderly parents' nursing home life. The characters here may be astonished to find themselves in midlife, but the issues they face are timeless: aging parents and thankless children; love and death; the inevitable losses -- and the unexpected joys -- that come with age. "Baker's humor never outweighs her compassion for the eccentric ways of the human heart." -- CONTRA COSTA TIMES "If the world is looking a bit mundane, try seeing it through Alison Baker's eyes." -- THE BELLINGHAM HERALD * Runner-up, Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award * Finalist, Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction

Author Biography

Alison Baker is the author of LOVING WANDA BEAVER and HOW I CAME WEST, AND WHY I STAYED. Both were named New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her award-winning stories have appeared in magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Story, and the Gettysburg Review, and they have been included in numerous anthologies, including The O. Henry Awards, Best of the West, and New Stories From the South. Her work has been featured on Selected Shorts at New York's Symphony Space and dramatized for stage in Seattle, San Francisco, and Takoma Park, Maryland. Her writing has been compared to that of Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore (a fact she mentions early and often), and she has been in residence at Ragdale, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Norman Mailer Foundation. A former medical librarian and library activist, she has been named the Oregon Library Supporter of the Year. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband, their two corgi-mix rescue dogs, and a calico cat.