Zoe Dubno

Zeitgeist and timeless, cynical but not soulless, Dubno’s propulsive debut is for lovers of Thomas Bernhard, art over theory, and anyone who has ever wondered “What the hell am I doing here?” Fabulous!

Zoe Dubno examines character and human relations in the same way an art critic looks at a painting. Digging deeper and deeper into the thoughts behind thoughts, feelings behind feelings and questioning everything, Happiness and Love is an ecstatic performance of heightened perception.

In Happiness and Love, Zoe Dubno viciously and delightfully skewers the vapid people – the neo-bohemians of the social media age – who masquerade their privilege as creativity. It is bracing and funny and fiercely clever, a first novel of extraordinary confidence and profoundly entertaining wickedness.

Orlando Whitfield, Nero-award listed author of All that Glitters

I loved this astute and hilarious skewering of New York’s psuedy cultural elite. Intelligent, relentless, nasty and fun, Happiness and Love is energising, vital and a total joy to read.

A single-paragraph diatribe in the tradition of Bernhard, Dubno's Happiness and Love turns disillusionment into an artistic rite of passage. Her voice is neurotic and laugh-out-loud mean, the narrator flinching at the sight of turmeric lattes and open relationships, weaponizing autofiction’s confessional mode not toward self-glorification, but toward a demolition of the ecosystems that once made the narrator feel special.

Years after escaping her unbearable artworld friends in New York for a new life in London, an unnamed writer finds herself back on the Lower East Side attending a dinner party hosted by Eugene and Nicole – an artist-curator couple – and attended by their pretentious circle. It’s the evening after the funeral of their mutual friend, a failed actress, and if the narrator once loved and admired Eugene and Nicole and their important friends, she now despises them all. Most of all, however, she despises herself for being lured back to this cavernous apartment, to this hollow, bourgeois social set, for a dinner party that isn’t even being thrown in their deceased friend’s honour, but in the honour of an up-and-coming actress who is by now several hours late. 
 
As the guests sip at their drinks and await the actress’s arrival, the narrator, from her vantage point in the corner seat of a white sofa entertains herself - and us - with a silent, tender, merciless takedown. 
 
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'Zeitgeist and timeless, cynical but not soulless... [For] anyone who has ever wondered “What the hell am I doing here?” Fabulous!' Melissa Broder, author of Milk Fed

Zoe Dubno

Praise for Happiness and Love

Zeitgeist and timeless, cynical but not soulless, Dubno’s propulsive debut is for lovers of Thomas Bernhard, art over theory, and anyone who has ever wondered “What the hell am I doing here?” Fabulo ...

Zoe Dubno examines character and human relations in the same way an art critic looks at a painting. Digging deeper and deeper into the thoughts behind thoughts, feelings behind feelings and questioning everything, < ...

In Happiness and Love, Zoe Dubno viciously and delightfully skewers the vapid people – the neo-bohemians of the social media age – who masquerade their privilege as creativity. It is bracing and funny and ...

Zeitgeist and timeless, cynical but not soulless, Dubno’s propulsive debut is for lovers of Thomas Bernhard, art over theory, and anyone who has ever wondered “What the hell am I doing here?” Fabulo ...

Zoe Dubno examines character and human relations in the same way an art critic looks at a painting. Digging deeper and deeper into the thoughts behind thoughts, feelings behind feelings and questioning everything, < ...

In Happiness and Love, Zoe Dubno viciously and delightfully skewers the vapid people – the neo-bohemians of the social media age – who masquerade their privilege as creativity. It is bracing and funny and ...

Zeitgeist and timeless, cynical but not soulless, Dubno’s propulsive debut is for lovers of Thomas Bernhard, art over theory, and anyone who has ever wondered “What the hell am I doing here?” Fabulo ...

Zoe Dubno examines character and human relations in the same way an art critic looks at a painting. Digging deeper and deeper into the thoughts behind thoughts, feelings behind feelings and questioning everything, < ...

In Happiness and Love, Zoe Dubno viciously and delightfully skewers the vapid people – the neo-bohemians of the social media age – who masquerade their privilege as creativity. It is bracing and funny and ...

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