Happy Are the Happy

The internationally acclaimed playwright and novelist Yasmina Reza stages a band of eighteen characters at war with their lives, with only humor to sustain them

Happy are the loved ones and the lovers and those who can do without love. Happy are the happy. --Jorge Luis Borges

Schnitzler's La Ronde gives these twenty short chapters their shape while Borges's poem gives them their content. As we move from story to story, thrilled to reconnect with an old acquaintance from an earlier scene, we can't help but admit that we are very much at home in this human comedy that understands all too well the passing thoughts, desires, actions, fears, and mistakes that we have and make day after day, but that we would be incapable of rendering with such acuity and compassion.

Yasmina Reza is a playwright and novelist whose plays have all been multi-award-winning critical and popular successes and have been translated into more than thirty languages. She has written six books, including Dawn Dusk or Night: A Year with Nicolas Sarkozy (Knopf 2008). She lives in Paris.

John Cullen is the translator of many books from Spanish, French, German, and Italian, including Yasmina Khadra’s Middle East Trilogy (The Swallows of Kabul, The Attack, and The Sirens of Baghdad), Eduardo Sacheri’s The Secret in Their Eyes (Other Press), Carlos Zanón’s The Barcelona Brothers (Other Press) and Rithy Panh’s The Elimination (Other Press). He lives in upstate New York. The author lives in Paris, France.