In these deft short stories, Danila Botha explores the desires of a cast of young, urban artists driven to escape their circumstances, from trendy Shakshuka bars to reality matchmaking shows to the horrors of the Holocaust. With fine prose and tender insight, Botha has written an indelible collection.
--Kathy Friedman, author of All the Shining People
Incredibly deep and powerful ... [the stories] feel like John Cheever's "Reunion," using what's said and what's not said to give us a novel's worth of story ... It's a brilliant display of technical skill and a satisfying read, and [it] greatly impresses me.
--JJ Dupuis, author of the Creature X Mystery series
Powerful and searing glimpses into people's most intimate emotions. Danila Botha's writing makes the reader stop cold, sit up and listen. She expertly finds deceptively quiet moments in her characters' lives, that by the end of her stories, reveal themselves to be more pivotal than we first realized. The characters in this collection will stay with me for a long time. An exquisite book.
--Sidura Ludwig, author of the Danuta Gleed Award winning collection You Are Not What We Expected
This book is pure, raw power. Like Botha's other work, the stories in Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness push against every boundary, offering unsettling glimpses into the wars women wage on their bodies, the messiness of finding and losing love, the self- sabotaging patterns that both propel and hold back. Botha is a master of balance, offering switchbacks between the pristine beauty of actual happiness paired with deep, unapologetic rage rooted in larger contexts like the patriarchy and historical genocides. Each story feels so real--the clear and authentic character voices often hold the power to reveal the exact essence of a character, sometimes in a single sentence. Though these stories capture a wide range of geographies and experiences, they always reflect on important, universal questions--where are the boundaries of forgiveness? Where is the line between two much and not enough?
--Leesa Dean, author of Waiting for the Cyclone and Filling Station
This sparkling collection documents the inner lives of girls and women with vivid emotion and delicious attitude. Botha's brilliant stories demand to be chewed on, mulled over, and talked about. Casting off the expectations of traditional style, they offer readers the comfort of generational wisdom and a clear-eyed view of our tumultuous present.
--Carleigh Baker, award-winning author of Bad Endings, Mudlarkers and Last Woman
We humans: what an endless braid of tender, joyful, painful, loving emotional pas de deux we live. In these stories, Danila Botha examines the complex knotting and unknotting of these contemporary relationships with vivid insight, deep compassion, and unflinching incision. They are virtuoso variations about what makes us human, what makes us--and our stories--irresistible, moving and compelling.
--Gary Barwin, award-winning author of Yiddish for Pirates, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted, and co-author of duck eats yeast, quacks, explodes; man loses eye
