You Must Be This Happy to Enter (Punk Planet Books) (Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: cute juniors, rainbow unicorn, glistening head, Ethan Hawke, The Barge, White House (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The two most successful stories of Crane's third collection (following All This Heavenly Glory) are also the most intimate: The Most Everything in the World listens in on a husband and wife playing the what-would-you-take-to-a-deserted-island game, while Donovan's Closet, about a girl with a fetish involving her boyfriend's lemon-scented closet, turns into an optimistic tale of a seemingly doomed relationship's survival. Other characters in Crane's lineup include a suburban zombie turned reality TV star (Betty the Zombie), a time-traveling photographer who gets arrested for being happy (the title story) and a handful of other victims and survivors of not-so-everyday life. Because of Crane's repetitive narration the book is best read piecemeal rather than straight through: I don't mean literally everything. Literally most things, but not everything. In Promise, a story about a woman waiting for the arrival of her adopted child, which closes the collection, Crane quips, I will feed you sugar. And that might as well be Crane's promise for the collection as a whole.
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From Booklist

A woman experiences either a spiritual transformation in her new lover’s closet or the onset of a weird new addiction. A time-traveling photographer is jailed for being happy. The citizens in Clearview wake up one morning and discover that everything has become transparent. A woman gets bitten in a fabric store, turns into a zombie, and seeks help on a reality TV show. Welcome to Crane’s loony universe, which actually is not much stranger than the world etched so crisply in “Varieties of Loudness in Chicago,” a droll tale about a fashionista in a new condo obsessed with her unhip neighbors, a family living in an old house with a big garden. In her third collection of inventive short stories, Crane continues to ingeniously satirize our muddled quest for meaning in all the wrong places. Her canny pivots from realistic trivia to outer-limits bizarreness, caustic humor, and underlying belief in goodness make for magnetizing, pleasingly barbed tales of the ever-shifting zeitgeist and the unchanging nature of the human heart. --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Paperback: 250 pages
• Publisher: Akashic Books (February 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933354437
• ISBN-13: 978-1933354439
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #723,262 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Refreshing, April 8, 2008

By	A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I haven't read either of Crane's earlier story collections (When the Messenger is Hot and All This Heavenly Glory), but definitely get the sense from the sixteen stories here that she's got her own style, and if you liked either of those collections, you'll like this one too. Not quite sure how to describe or define that style, but her work has appeared in Nerve, The Believer, a McSweeny's anthology, and another anthology called "The Best in Underground Fiction" (among other places), which might help to give a sense of her sensibility. It's somewhat sharp, somewhat sweet, somewhat quirky (ugh, I hate that word), somewhat satirical, somewhat pop culture referencing, and permeates every story. In that sense, it's definitely a collection best read a story at a time, spaced out over a few weeks, otherwise the stories are liable to run together.

Some are basically, one-trick ponies, built on a single premise that can barely sustain the few pages allotted to it. For example, the first story, "My Life is Awesome! And Great!" is a rambling monologue by a woman desperately trying to convince herself of the titular statement, and every sentence of her monologue ends with an upbeat exclamation point. Like this! "Notes For A Story About People With Weird Phobias" is just that -- ten pages outlining a prospective talk show about people scared of strange stuff. In "What Happens When the Mipods Leave Their Milieu," the author of an acclaimed graphic novel about religion is hired by a university and doesn't know how to confront the assumption of irony placed upon his work.

Others are more surreal and correspondingly interesting. One of my favorites is "Clearview," about a normal small town in which everything suddenly appears transparent, clothes, buildings, everything. How that plays out, how people react, and what happens to those who can still see solid objects is really compelling and satirical. Another excellent example is "Donovan's Closet," in which a woman becomes addicted to her new boyfriend's closet. I also quite liked "Blue Girl," about a girl whose forehead becomes a fortune-telling device and the collection's titular story, about a photographer who time-travels to an era when being happy is unlawful, but still manages to find love.

On the whole, I could have lived without some of the more gimmicky stories, but there's an underlying happiness and joy to the stories that is an exceedingly refreshing antidote to the overwritten (oops, I mean carefully crafted) short fiction one tends to find in the mainstream outlets and major publishers. Definitely not everyone's cup of tea, but worth a taste just to see if you like it. Unfortunately, none of the stories are available at the author's web site, but if you poke around a little online you can probably find one or two to sample.

4.0 out of 5 stars The word "glad" appears on my forehead, May 27, 2008

By	Richard LeComte "richlec" (Tuscaloosa, AL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Crane's early collection impressed me, and I am so often unimpressed with short-story collections nowadays. So I picked up "Happy" and ended up happy I did. These well-written, erudite and slightly off-key stories add up to a collection that probes the ideas of fate, faith and longing in ways that permit happy (or at least open-ended) endings. "Promise" made me a bit weepy, because all contemporary parents (at least parents of a certain age) feel like that -- we're not going to be our parents, but we are, and yet we're not. The "forehead" story was poignant as well. Her sentences, especially the long ones punctuated buy exclamation points and filled with subordinate clauses, many of which are funny asides, and often veer into unexpected areas, like cheating or noisy neighborhoods, generally are great!

5.0 out of 5 stars You'll be even happier once you get inside, March 5, 2008

By	Jon S. Wesick (Carlsbad, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a collection of original, hilarious stories. My favorite is "Betty the Zombie" about a woman who gets on a theraputic reality show to deal with her "human flesh eating issues."