Beautifully rendered and psychologically astute tales of life, family, and art from a true American master "The Sunday Painter," a surprisingly comic tale, is the account of an amateur artist whose obsession with distilling his work to its most basic form-light-leads to a mental breakdown. "The First Day of School" is a moving and intimately observed portrait of the courage summoned by an African American family in the early days of integration. In "The Covenant," a thirteen-year-old boy is confronted with his own mortality and instinctually redirects his anger and confusion elsewhere-the first lesson of adulthood. Beneath the deceptively anecdotal narration of "The Swimmers at Pallikula" lie deep truths about the absurdity of life and death and the eternal struggle for self-knowledge.As the editor of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, a founder of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), and a longtime teacher at the University of Iowa, Purdue University, and Brown University, R. V. Cassill influenced generations of American authors. In The Happy Marriage and Other Stories, this expert craftsman is at his most varied and vital.
"Psychological precision, sociological understanding and philosophical trust, not to mention a command of organic form in the short story and a remarkable range of flexible styles . . . with more skill and taste than is his fair share, Cassill demonstrates for our time how viable the existential imagination can be in America."
The New York Times
"Mr. Cassill writes with whirling energy and explosive metaphorical shiftiness. His style is perpetually inventive; one reads with the joyful sense of something being continually created under one's eyes."
The New York Review of Books
"Mr. Cassill writes like a streak, with wit, boldness and invention."
