{"id":83464,"date":"2015-01-21T15:59:49","date_gmt":"2015-01-21T20:59:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=83464"},"modified":"2017-01-26T14:15:45","modified_gmt":"2017-01-26T19:15:45","slug":"language-arts-lives-presents-author-of-happiest-people-in-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2015\/01\/21\/language-arts-lives-presents-author-of-happiest-people-in-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Language Arts Lives presents author of ‘Happiest People in the World’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Maine<\/a>

Maine author Brock Clarke. (Jon Hughes\/Photopresse)<\/p><\/div>\n

As part of Bates’ Language Arts Live series, Portland author Brock Clarke reads from his novel The Happiest People in the World<\/em> at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 29, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.<\/p>\n

Amazon’s Best Book of the Month for November 2014, The Happiest People in the World<\/em> was described by The Wall Street Journal<\/em> as a “dark and funny satire” that “reflects the absurdity of any country obsessed with spying on its own people.” Admission to the event is free. For more information, call 207-786-6256.<\/p>\n

In Clarke’s witty twist on the spy novel, the titular “happiest people” are the Danes, inventors of such joyous things as Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and the open-faced sandwich. Not everyone is so happy, however, when Danish political cartoonists draw Muhammad in their comics, resulting in arson and assassination attempts\u00a0\u2014 a plotline inspired by real events in Denmark in 2005 and made acutely relevant by the recent attack on the Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo<\/em>.<\/p>\n

A satire in the very essence of the word, the novel follows one of these cartoonists, who is relocated by the CIA to a small town in upstate New York, where almost every resident is a CIA operative.<\/p>\n

“This book is a goofball, but a goofball with an edge,” wrote Chicago Tribune<\/em> reviewer Kathleen Rooney. Its “humor and quirkiness are not ends in themselves, but doors that Clarke uses to open the view out onto a bigger vista: the span of America, unto itself, and in relation to the world.”<\/p>\n

Clarke is a professor of English at Bowdoin College. His work has been published in The New York Times<\/em>, Boston Globe<\/em>, One Story<\/em>, New England Review<\/em> and Virginia Quarterly Review<\/em>, as well as appearing on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.”<\/p>\n

His previous books include the national bestseller An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England<\/em> (Algonquin Books, 2007) and Exley<\/em> (Algonquin, 2010), a finalist for the Maine Book Award. The Happiest People in the World<\/em> is his sixth novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As part of Bates College’s Language Arts Live series, Portland author Brock Clarke reads from his novel “The Happiest People in the World” on Jan. 29.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":83465,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[11010],"tags":[10721,178,6889,9087],"class_list":["post-83464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","tag-french","tag-language-arts-live","tag-performing-and-visual-arts","tag-visual-arts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83464"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83466,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83464\/revisions\/83466"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}