Happy Stories, Mostly

Longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize

Shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2022

Happy Stories, Mostly is a playful, charged and tender collection of twelve stories a blend of speculative fiction and dark absurdism, often drawing on Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s Batak and Christian cultures. Pasaribu’s stories ask what it means to be almost happy almost to find joy, almost to be accepted, but never quite grasp one’s desire. Joy and contentment shimmer on the horizon, just out of reach.

In one story, an employee is introduced to their new workplace a department of Heaven devoted to archiving unanswered prayers. In another, a woman on holiday in Vietnam attempts to find solace following the suicide of her son. In a third, a young man befriends a university classmate obsessed with verifying the existence of a mythical hundred-foot-tall man.

Throughout the collection, queerness is a fact of life from which tragicomic events spring, amidst the forces that keep people from those whom they yearn for most, and the miraculous, melancholy ability to survive such loneliness. In the words of one of the stories’ narrators, ‘I work in the dark. Like mushrooms. I don’t need light to thrive.’

Author Biography

Born in 1990, Norman Erikson Pasaribu is an Indonesian author whose work spans fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. His first collection of stories in Indonesian was shortlisted for the 2014 Khatulistiwa Literary Award for Prose. His debut poetry collection Sergius Seeks Bacchus won the 2015 Jakarta Arts Council Poetry Competition, was shortlisted for the 2016 Khatulistiwa Literary Award for Poetry and named by Tempo as one of the best poetry collections of that year. His stories have been published in English by The White Review and Catapult, among other outlets. He lives in Jakarta.