You Are Having a Good Time

“Each of the 10 stories in Barrodale’s collection is a gem: elegant, subversive, and surprising . . . an impressive breadth of settings and characters.” -Travel and Leisure

Named a Best Book of the Year by The 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.

“For fans of Lydia Davis and David Foster Wallace, her debut is incisive, risky, and a little irreverent, and a real writer’s book.” -Elle

“Stark and cutting . . . The book’s power comes from Barrodale’s ability to distort and project the familiar into something new, like a visual artist playing with shadows cast on a gallery wall.” -Nicholas Mancusi, The New York Times Book Review