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Start giftingAre You Happy Now?
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Learn moreJohn Lincoln is a book editor miserably ensconced at Pistakee, a dinky Chicago publisher. His overwhelming ambition is to flee the bland, over polite Midwest and land in New York—where, he imagines, he’ll work with real writers; brandish success at his skeptical, patrician East Coast parents; and experience again the glories of a city where, with “every block, every step,” he will find something interesting and exciting.
What he needs is a hot bestseller, and he finds his vehicle in Amy O’Malley, a recent University of Chicago grad who’s worked on the school’s famous sex survey. With Lincoln’s prodding and guidance, Amy writes a sex-filled novel that draws on her experience. Her book indeed opens doors for Lincoln—but not in the way he imagined. Meanwhile, a professor of happiness studies at a local college blackmails him into publishing his fantastically mundane poetry.
Reminiscent of Richard Russo’s Straight Man, Are You Happy Now? is a comic novel about the hard work of understanding what it is you want.
Until stepping down in 2011, Richard Babcock was the longtime editor in chief of Chicago magazine. Before that, he spent more than a decade as a top editor at New York magazine. He is the author of the best-selling Kindle Singles stories “My Wife’s Story” and “Ah, Rat.” Are You Happy Now? is Babcock’s third novel, after Martha Calhoun (1988) and Bow‘s Boy (2002). Raised in Woodstock, Illinois, Babcock graduated from Dartmouth College and the University of Michigan Law School. He lives in Chicago with his wife, Gioia Diliberto, an acclaimed biographer and novelist. He has taught at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Knox College, and Loyola University of Chicago. In addition to writing and teaching, Babcock occupies himself in following the Chicago Cubs, a team he credits for a lifetime’s schooling in the “nuances of failure and loss.”
Reviews
Society of Midland Author Awards, finalist in the Adult Fiction category
“A smooth, winning plot” —Publishers Weekly
“[A] smart yet winsome story about the realization of unlikely dreams.” —Booklist
“A compelling look at the world of words and those who love, write, edit, and sell them.” —Rick Kogan, Chicago Tribune
“The headlong, grimly uncomfortable ride John Lincoln endures across Chicago’s literary, sexual and baseball divides is a sweet comic blast onto West Waveland Avenue. Gone.” —James McManus, author of Going to the Sun and Positively Fifth Street
“A witty, rueful novel about one man’s midlife crisis amid the upheavals in the publishing world.” —Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle and Half Broke Horses
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