Happiness Economics: Amazon.ca: Shari Lapeña: Books

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Review

"[This book] is a big rollicking, lusty book filled with characters who get in you and stay—I dare you to not love and care about these people. It's a rewarding story, a beautifully unraveled journey. It's as clever as hell and filled with massive heart. Happiness Economics is a Brava! performance by a writer to watch." —The Winnipeg Review

(20110901)

"A wonderful tale of poets and their Muses, of social navigations and marriages adrift. Full of heart and deftly told." —Will Ferguson, author of Happiness

(20110901)

"This novel revels in the inherent comedy of what happens when art meets commerce; when the muse inspires ad slogans. Happiness Economics hilariously pits poetry's ineffable artistic charms against the hard numbers that rule our daily lives." —Lynn Coady, author of Mean Boy

(20110923)

"Lapeña looks at the big questions our culture burdens itself with and somehow transforms it all into a deliciously likable romp." —January Magazine

(20110901)

"A funny yet earnest tale." —Quill & Quire

(20111016)

"All four main characters—parents and children—are engrossing and real. Lapeña builds quiet suspense expertly, and has a knack for showing us inside these terribly flawed and sometimes annoying people, making them beautiful in their ordinary and contradictory ways." —The Globe and Mail

(20111027)

"The skewering of personalities in both worlds was fun and yet not too cruel. And I was glad that in the end both Will and Judy were shown to be complex people with no villainy ascribed to either. 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 blog

Book Description

Will Thorne is a slightly published, stalled poet, married to Judy, a successful celebrity economist who doesn’t understand him, or poetry, at all. Pressured by a fellow poet, Will starts The Poets’ Preservation Society, a genteel organization to help poets in need. But in order to persuade his high-powered wife to get him the necessary funding, Will must make a devil’s bargain with her: he will write advertising slogans so that he can, in Judy’s words, contribute to society. Writing slogans for toilet paper and spending his free time on the administrative work for the society, Will has neither the time nor the inspiration to finish his novel in poems. 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 is a comic novel about a poet’s heroic struggle to create, in the face of cultural and domestic impediments.

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