Happy Stories, Mostly is a wonderful short story collection by Norman Erikson Pasaribu. The book's title is - of course - misleading, as the stories are not cheerful tales. In the words of the translator Tiffany Tsao: "So many of the stories are about the heartbreak of 'almost' - either deep longings denied, or hopes crushed, or false notions shattered, or coming so close to happiness or actually experiencing it, only to have it ripped away."

Normally, I have mixed feelings about a short story collection, but i read this one cover to cover. The stories queer the norm and are inventive, layered and emotionally charged. Most of all, i found this book refreshing and memorable.

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"(...) I felt that such a story would prove useful someday - a bottomless pit ow sorrow-bricks for me to mine, to build my Babel Tower of misery. Maybe one day I could tell the story to someone who could fall asleep only if they heard a sad tale. With my story's help, they'd be able to slumber in peace for a very long time. Forever perhaps. And so, from that point on, in order to make the story even sadder, I decided to start taking writing classes - where questions like "What is the worst thing you ever experienced?" and "What is your darkest secret" are routinely trotted out to be answered by people, a portion of whom are sure from the start that it is they who have the most miserable experience, that strangest secret, the wildes imagination, to the point that, from the start, they won't take much interest in the story I'll tell them, much less in me."