Zoe Dubno

Deliciously scathing . . . Judgemental yet self-aware, caustic yet warm, Dubno’s book will have you yelping in recognition – either at the state of your own friendships (or depending on your lifestyle and bank balance) at the characters on the page.

A gorgeous book on being a hater, and I inhaled this in one sitting.

Breathless, damning, funny, elegiac . . . The achievement here is unquestionably substantial. Dubno has managed to write a work of high style that is also a document of real emotion.

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!

Exceptionally funny and entertaining.

Katy Hessel, author of The Story of Art Without Men

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 master class in irony, wit and storytelling, Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love is one of the most incisive and entertaining novels I’ve read this year. In a style redolent of Thomas Bernhard but very much her own and zeroing in on a 21st century New York art monster milieu, she manages to capture in every sentence delicious truths about our era that a thousand news articles barely touch. A triumph!

John Keene, winner of the National Book Award

The pleasures of this book’s humanity are instant and lingering. The result is, strangely, you not only love the book, you actually end up liking yourself a good deal more.

Borrowing Thomas Bernhard's breakneck and largely break-free prose as a vehicle, Zoe Dubno sends the reader on an exhilarating, head-spinning tour of a downtown New York full of leeches and jackals and worse. Her nameless narrator is bug-eyed and sharp-nibbed and the result is utterly alive with her italicised contempt, splenetic wit, irate pathos, and - spoiler alert - transcendent charity.

Zoe Dubno has written a savage, whip-smart and genuinely hilarious take-down of New York’s culture production eco system — from art to magazine and book publishing to film and TV. And like the best work — form mirrors content as we journey into the twisted mind of a fascinating product of that very eco-system, tossed on a dark sea of delectable aspersions until we can’t tell who’s good, who’s bad and, most importantly, who’s a real artist.

Happiness and Love is a wildly intelligent debut that anatomizes our cultural affectations with wit and uncanny clarity. Formally daring, it upends our notions of aesthetic ambition, social performance, and maps the erosion of our collective sincerity — all while occupying the porous boundary between critique and complicity. I loved it.

Zain Khalid, author of Brother Alive, “5 Under 35” National Book Foundation honoree

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.

Fun, clever and full of heart, Happiness and Love is the art world massacre we’ve been waiting for.

Stephanie LaCava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You

Happiness and Love is a delightful, breathless effusion of vitriol aimed at a degraded art world characterized by commercial goals, swiped ideas, and bad faith. Yet even as the narrator is spewing hatred — witty, fun-to-read acid opinions — toward her ex art world friends, she cannot hide from the reader that her disappointment comes from an idealistic and tender heart. Zoe Dubno is a marvelous, fresh, undeniable new voice.

Alice Elliott Dark, author of Fellowship Point

A scathing, sharp and cathartic chronicle of every thought you’ve ever had about the people you hate to love and love to hate.

‘Exceptionally funny and entertaining’ Katy Hessel, author of The Story of Art Without Men 
 
‘An ecstatic performance of heightened perception’ Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick 
 
‘Zeitgeist and timeless, cynical but not soulless. Fabulous!’ Melissa Broder, author of Milk Fed 
 
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. 
 
‘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

Zoe Dubno

Praise for Happiness and Love

Deliciously scathing . . . Judgemental yet self-aware, caustic yet warm, Dubno’s book will have you yelping in recognition – either at the state of your own friendships (or depending on your lifestyle and ban ...

A gorgeous book on being a hater, and I inhaled this in one sitting.

Breathless, damning, funny, elegiac . . . The achievement here is unquestionably substantial. Dubno has managed to write a work of high style that is also a document of real emotion.

Deliciously scathing . . . Judgemental yet self-aware, caustic yet warm, Dubno’s book will have you yelping in recognition – either at the state of your own friendships (or depending on your lifestyle and ban ...

A gorgeous book on being a hater, and I inhaled this in one sitting.

Breathless, damning, funny, elegiac . . . The achievement here is unquestionably substantial. Dubno has managed to write a work of high style that is also a document of real emotion.

Deliciously scathing . . . Judgemental yet self-aware, caustic yet warm, Dubno’s book will have you yelping in recognition – either at the state of your own friendships (or depending on your lifestyle and ban ...

A gorgeous book on being a hater, and I inhaled this in one sitting.

Breathless, damning, funny, elegiac . . . The achievement here is unquestionably substantial. Dubno has managed to write a work of high style that is also a document of real emotion.

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter