You Are Having a Good Time -- Amie Barrodale, Paperback

Named A Best Book of 2016 by Wall Street Journal, Vulture, Refinery29, Financial Times, and The Guardian

In You Are Having a Good Time, Amie Barrodale's collection of highly compressed and charged tales, the veneer of normality is stripped from her characters' lives to reveal the seething and contradictory desires that fuel them. In "Animals," an up-and-coming starlet harbors a complicated attraction toward her abusive director. In "Frank Advice for Fat Women," an ethically compromised psychiatrist is drawn into the middle of a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship. And in "The Imp," a supernatural possession ruins a man's relationship with his pregnant wife.

Barrodale's protagonists drink too much, say the wrong things, want the wrong people. They're hounded by longings (and sometimes ghosts) to the point where they are forced to confront the illusions they cling to. They're brought to life in stories that don't behave as you expect stories to behave. Barrodale's startlingly funny and original fictions get under your skin and make you reconsider the fragile compromises that underpin our daily lives.

Author: Amie Barrodale
Publisher: Fsg Adult
Published: 07/05/2016
Pages: 208
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 7.40h x 4.90w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9780374293864

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 04/18/2016
Kirkus Reviews 05/01/2016

About the Author
Amie Barrodale's stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper's Magazine, VICE, McSweeney's, and other publications. In 2012 she was awarded The Paris Review's Plimpton Prize for Fiction for her story William Wei. She is a former staff writer for The Onion and is currently the fiction editor at VICE.