Book Three

My next book is Happy by Alex Lemon. I have read two of his books of poetry, Hallelujah Blackout, and Fancy Beasts and both were excellent. When I was reading Fancy Beasts this past semester for a project in my creative writing class, I was looking things up online and found that he had a memoir coming out soon. I read some excerpts from it online and I was hooked. So here we are and Happy is the third book on my list.

Here's some of the praise Happy received:

"Alex Lemon takes his reader inside the terror and strangeness of illness--and gives us, along the way, a loving portrait, of a devoted, wonderfully nutty mother. Lemon is a brave, headlong writer, and he captures the life of the body with vivid and memorable intensity." --Mark Doty, author of Dog Years and Fire to Fire


"The pyrotechnic prose of Alex Lemon's memoir creates an electrifying portrait of a body in crisis, and the way the soul is inexorably, reluctantly, dragged along . . . If ever a book was written in blood, it is this one."
--Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City


"Happy unfurls like gauze, revealing not a wound, but a series of intricate and beautiful scars. Alex reminds us that though we can't make it through this life unscathed, we can make it through transformed." --Robin Romm, author of The Mercy Papers and The Mother Garden


"A page-turner on par with the best thrillers . . . Lemon's exquisite prose blasts us out of our own time, heart, brain, and body into his, making an acute empathy possible. Read this and weep, laugh, weep." --Library Journal, Editor's Pick

This sounds like a fantastic book and memoir and I can't wait to get started. It shouldn't be too hard to beat Life of Pi--it will at least have quite a bit of excitement, that's for sure. You can also look this up on Amazon.com and read excerpts from it, so if you like what you see, you can buy it!