One of New York Magazine’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025Happiness and Love is a piercing debut novel about brazen materialism, self-obsession, and the empty careerism of so-called cultural elites.
The story takes place over the course of one outrageous and insufferable downtown dinner party at the home of the narrator's estranged best friends—an artist and curator couple, whom she now realizes stand for everything she detests. 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.
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.
