Joel Allegretti is the author of six books and chapbooks of poetry and a novella, Our Dolphin. He is the editor of Rabbit Ears: TV Poems, which The Boston Globe called “cleverly edited” and “a smart exploration of the many, many meanings of TV.” He has collaborated with contemporary composers on musical settings of his poems. Allegretti is a member of the Academy of American Poets and ASCAP.
Let’s All Be Happy Today
Let’s All Be Happy Today is the debut short story collection of Joel Allegretti, featuring seventeen lurid snapshots of human existence, in all its banal glory. Allegretti’s cutting wit and scathing observations about daily life and the torments of various “average joes” speak effortlessly to that Charlie Chaplin adage, “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”
“Let’s All Be Happy Today brilliantly captures the mundane yet somehow deeply unsettling flow of life growing up in the middle-class world of post-war America. Disturbing, haunting and, in some cases, unbearably honest, each story takes everyday moments and subtly twists them, pulling the reader into the dark currents that lie below.”
-Maggie Dubris, author of BrokeDown Palace
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