The Happiness of Others brings together the best stories from Rooke's first two books published in Canada, The Love Parlour (Oberon, 1977) and Cry Evil (Oberon, 1980), both now out of print, with a selection of stories from The Broad Back of the Angel (Fiction Collective, 1977) which was never available in this country.
At the centre of this collection is the novella `The Street of Moons', which, as Rooke writes in the introduction, `takes as its point of departure from that particularly American, particularly nasty sensibility which regards all countries, especially Latin-American ones, as adjuncts of their own property, and their people as second-class citizens who ought to be speaking English.' And as Russell Banks comments, `It's when he's funny ... which he often is, that he's at his most dangerous.... He's a writer with a voice so sharp and personal that he changes your life while you're busy laughing at it.'
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