This collection of short stories and essays by Hilary Sloin gives fullest expression to the pitch-perfect humor of a writer whose work deserves a much wider audience than it reached in her lifetime. Sloin evokes with surprising precision the tangled inner lives of diverse people navigating the day-to-day of work, love, sex, and sanity. Before her death Sloin compiled the stories into a manuscript she titled The Cure for Unhappiness; this edition includes autobiographical essays she wrote in the same years and published on her blog.
Hilary Sloin (1963 – 2019) is the author of the novel Art on Fire, which won the Stonewall Book Awards/Barbara Gittings Literature Prize — and fittingly, since it is a critique of both the literary and art worlds, the non-fiction prize at the Amherst Book and Plow Competition. Sloin’s play Lust and Pity was produced in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Chicago. A native of New Haven, Connecticut, Sloin was awarded a scholarship to Marlboro College in Vermont, where she studied writing. She lived for many years in New York City and later in Western Massachusetts, where she owned and ran a shop called Stray Dog Antiques.
“Hilary Sloin’s short stories and essays are direct, out loud, and outspoken. From the hilltowns of Western Massachusetts to Queens, NY, a suburban strip mall to a loud bar in a small town, Sloin populates her settings with desire and despair in vivid, searing prose.”
— Aaron Newman
“The essays in The Cure for Unhappiness convey the balancing act of living with mental illness while also exerting a creative energy and attending to the small beauties of life at hand. A writer as brave as Hilary Sloin demands to be read.”
— Meta4 & Madness
