Lori Ostlund Author Talk at Petals & Pages

Join us for an author talk and book signing with award-winning author Lori Ostlund to discuss her latest short story collection, Are You Happy? Lori will be in conversation with author EJ Levy.

About Are You Happy?: Nine masterful stories that explore class, desire, identity, and the spectrum of violence in America–and in American families–against women and the LGBTQ+ community.

A collection filled with surprise, dark humor, and deep compassion, from the author of The Bigness of the World, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

In Lori Ostlund’s exquisite collection, Are You Happy?, she examines the lives of people who have left their place and culture of origin behind. Set in Minnesota, New Mexico, and California, we watch Ostlund’s characters as they try–and often fail–to make peace with their pasts while navigating their present relationships and responsibilities.

In deceptively straightforward prose Ostlund delves deep into the interpersonal and grapples with the compulsion to make others happy–and the elusiveness of being happy oneself. As a woman mourns the premature loss of her best friend’s youth, two parents the life of their son, a queer couple their feeling of safety, and a daughter her family’s political integrity, Ostlund paints a distinctly American portrait of violence manifest at its most intimate scale.

Richly layered and structurally complex, these stories have a novelistic feel. Lori Ostlund is a master of the form and Are You Happy? showcases her best work to date.

About Lori Ostlund: Lori Ostlund is the author of Are You Happy? (Astra House, May 2025). Her novel After the Parade (Scribner, 2015) was a B&N Discover pick, a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and a NYTimes Editors’ Choice. Her first book, The Bigness of the World (UGA, 2009; Scribner, 2016), received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the California Book Award for First Fiction. Her stories have appeared in the Best American Short Stories, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, ZYZZYVA, and New England Review, among other places. Lori has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award and was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She has served as the series editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award since 2022 and is on the board of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She lives in San Francisco with her wife, the writer Anne Raeff. www.loriostlund.com

About EJ Levy: EJ Levy’s debut novel, The Cape Doctor (Little Brown, 2021), was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a B&N Book of Summer, a 2022 Colorado Book Award winner, and received the 2024 Prix Libr’a Nous for Best Foreign Fiction for a translation by Celine Leroy. Booklist called The Cape Doctor “an unforgettable work of art.” Levy’s story collection, Love, In Theory (UGA, 2012) won a Flannery O’Connor Award and Great Lakes Colleges Associations’ New Writers Award; Kirkus named it a Best Indie Book of 2013. Levy’s anthology, Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers (Avon), won a Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Best American Essays, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and The New York Times, among other places; her stories have twice been named among the Distinguished Stories in Best American Short Stories.

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