A finalist for the 2012 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, Happiness Economics has already received tons of great reviews and endorsements (see below).
I encourage you to come out tonight for an entertaining reading and a chance to meet one Canada’s brightest literary talents. The reading starts at 7 pm. and all are welcome.
“Will Thorne is a stalled poet, married to Judy, a wildly successful celebrity economist. Pressured by a starving fellow poet, Will establishes The Poets’ Preservation Society, a genteel organization to help poets in need. But when Will meets his muse, the enigmatic and athletic Lily White, he becomes inspired not only to write poetry, but to take guerrilla action in support of poets everywhere. Poetry meets parkour and culture clashes with commerce in this hilarious look at how we measure the value of art.“
“Happiness Economics hilariously pits poetry’s ineffable artistic charms against the hard numbers that rule our daily lives.” – Lynn Coady
“Definitely a book to put on the “poets in literature” list; I think it would be in great company with Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist and Lynn Coady’s Mean Boy.” – The Indextrious Reader
“Happiness Economics is about lofty ideas like the meaning and relevance of poetry, the validity of ‘the muse,’ the way we are raising our children, and capitalism itself. But at its heart it is a beautifully articulated treatise on long-term relationships and how they change as the people in them invariably do, over and over.” – The Globe and Mail
Also consider checking out Shari’s first novel, Things Go Flying. (M)
“Harold Walker is desperately average and listless at mid-life, stemming in part from the abrupt death of his one-time best friend, Tom. Harold’s wife Audrey, an increasingly frustrated housewife and mother to their two teenage sons, is a control freak silently harboring an explosive secret. Things go flying in the Walker household when Harold’s long-deceased mother comes back to haunt them. He finds he has her gift for opening the door to the past-and if there was ever a gift he wanted to return, it’s this one! Audrey is similarly terrified-how is she to safeguard her secret now? If she can’t control this world, how is she to control the next one? And how will she protect her good china? Harold, who has made a practice of avoiding things all his life, must confront two problems-how to find meaning in this life, and how to come to grips with the mostly terrifying idea that life just might go on forever!”
“Shari Lapeña’s novel is wonderful high-purpose fun. The characters try to be unremarkable, but remarkable things keep happening to them. I enjoyed it tremendously.”- Paul Quarrington
“Lapeña stretches belief with great charm. Her cameo clips of Voltaire and Nietzsche are a mind-tweaking delight. Her style is a gently exaggerated verisimilitude, her form spooky farce, all held aloft by sensitive portraits of four very different human animals.” – Globe and Mail
Source: http://www.thereader.ca/2012/08/shari-lapena-author-reading.html