Happiness and Love - by Zoe Dubno (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Following a young woman over the course of one outrageous and insufferable downtown dinner party at the home of her estranged best friends--an artist and curator couple, whom she now realizes stand for everything she detests--Happiness and Love is a piercing debut novel about brazen materialism, self-obsession, and the empty careerism of so-called cultural elites. Years after escaping New York and the center of its artistic world--a group of self-important, depraved, and unscrupulous artists, curators, and hangers-on--our narrator is back in town. With no plans to see anyone she once knew, she's wandering around the Lower East Side, thinking about the recent death of her former best friend, Rebecca, when she runs into Eugene, one half of the artist-curator couple at the heart of her old social set. Despite her better judgement, she accepts his invitation to a dinner party. And though the party is held only hours after Rebecca's funeral, it not a memorial of Rebecca but a dinner held in honor of a young, newly famous actress whose lateness delays the party by hours. As the guests sip their natural wine and await the actress's arrival, the narrator, from her perch on the corner seat of a white sofa, silently, systematically, and mercilessly eviscerates them--their manners, their relationships, their delusions and failures, and the complete moral poverty that brings them here, to Nicole and Eugene's loft on the Bowery. When the guest of honor finally does arrive, she sets in motion a disastrous end to the evening, laying bare the depravity and decadence of the hosts' empty little lives--a hollowness that the narrator herself knows all too well."--

Book Synopsis

One of New York Magazine's Most Anticipated Books of 2025

Following a young woman over the course of one outrageous and insufferable downtown dinner party at the home of her estranged best friends--an artist and curator couple, whom she now realizes stands for everything she detests--Happiness and Love is a piercing debut novel about brazen materialism, self-obsession, and the empty careerism of so-called cultural elites.

Years after escaping New York and the center of its artistic world--a group of self-important, depraved, and unscrupulous artists, curators, and hangers-on--our narrator is back in town. With no plans to see anyone she once knew, she's wandering around the Lower East Side, thinking about the recent death of her former best friend, Rebecca, when she runs into Eugene, one half of the artist-curator couple at the heart of her old social set. Despite her better judgement, she accepts his invitation to a dinner party. And though the party is held only hours after Rebecca's funeral, it not a memorial of Rebecca but a dinner held in honor of a young, newly famous actress whose lateness delays the party by hours.

As the guests sip their natural wine and await the actress's arrival, the narrator, from her perch on the corner seat of a white sofa, silently, systematically, and mercilessly eviscerates them--their manners, their relationships, their delusions and failures, and the complete moral poverty that brings them here, to Nicole and Eugene's loft on the Bowery. When the guest of honor finally does arrive, she sets in motion a disastrous end to the evening, laying bare the depravity and decadence of the hosts' empty little lives--a hollowness that the narrator herself knows all too well.

Review Quotes

"[A] nervy and blisteringly funny new novel."
--The Wall Street Journal

"Loosely inspired by Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters, Dubno's novel combines that Austrian novelist's spleen with a chattier, up-to-the-moment sensibility."
--The Washington Post

"Dubno's acerbic wit and brutal observations of how we try to perform the charmed, curated life--all while craving the "real"--make for a riveting read."
--Vogue

"Brutal and entertaining."
--People

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

"Reading the novel is akin to spending time with a witty if merciless observer of other people's idiocies . There's something of a latter- day Holden Caulfield about the narrator...it possesses an enlivening, claustrophobic charge."
--The Spectator

"Dubno updates Bernhard's drawing-room fiction with a shiny and pleasurable modern gloss, shot through with incisive class commentary... Readers will devour this in one gulp."
--Publishers Weekly

"Wryly amusing... a minefield of a novel, whose cutting and often brilliant observations will delight and terrify those in the know."
--Kirkus

"A blistering satire on friendship, capitalism, class, and culture, Happiness and Love is a smart, acerbic debut."
--Dazed

"Zingy... Told in a single long, savage and hilarious paragraph, Happiness and Love can be gulped in one delicious go."
--Financial Times

"Breathless, damning, funny, elegiac, often all at once."
--The London Magazine

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

"Zeitgeisty 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!"
--Melissa Broder, author of Death Valley

"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."
--Chris Kraus, author of The Four Spent the Day Together

"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."
--James L. Brooks, co-creator of The Simpsons

"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, National Book Award-winning author of Punks

"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 and In the Gloaming

"Exceptionally funny and entertaining."
--Katy Hessel, author of The Story of Art Without Men

"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

"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."
--Lexi Freiman, author of The Book of Ayn

"A scathing, sharp and cathartic chronicle of every thought you've ever had about the people you hate to love and love to hate."
--Nicola Dinan, author of Disappoint Me

"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, author of All That Glitters

About the Author

Zoe Dubno is a writer from New York. She attended Oberlin College and has an MFA from Rutgers University, Newark. Her fiction has appeared in Granta and Muumuu House and NY Tyrant, her nonfiction in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The Nation, Vogue, BOMB, and elsewhere. She lives in New York and London. Happiness and Love is her first novel.