Half as Happy

"These stories are both funny and sad, in the true and inescapable way of real life, full of elegiac beauty. A masterful collection."--Brad Watson, author of "The Heaven of Mercury"A grieving couple rents a desperate landlord's house in an effort to recover lost intimacy. Twins are irrevocably separated by events both beyond and within their control. A nighttime prank and its gruesome aftermath forge human connections no one could have anticipated.The eight stories in "Half as Happy" reveal with startling clarity their characters' secrets, losses, and desires. Each with the depth of a novel, these insightful portraits of the darkness and light within us reverberate long after they've ended, like beautiful and disturbing dreams.From "String": "We were not bad kids. We'd never stolen candy bars, tormented insects or smaller children, drowned cats. Our worst crime the previous summer: breaking into the Cassidys' back yard to float in their pool on a moonlit night and imagine one or all of the pretty young sisters who lived there coming out to join us, or leaning from the windows of the upper story bedrooms with their hair down and the straps of their nightgowns falling away."Gregory Spatz is the author of "Inukshuk" (Bellevue Literary Press), "Fiddler's Dream," "No One But Us," and "Wonderful Tricks." His short stories have appeared in literary journals and magazines, and he has published numerous book and music reviews in "The Oxford American." He is the winner of a 2012 NEA Literature Fellowship.