Happy Baby by Stephen Elliot

• Chicago Public Library, USA
  

Publisher of Nominated Edition
MacAdam/Cage Publishing
ISBN 1931561621

Stephen Elliott's new novel, Happy Baby, explores how pain can define desire, how the future becomes the past, and how grace struggles with self-destruction. The story, told in reverse, begins with thirty-six-year-old Theo and his search for sexual and emotional freedom, and slowly unravels back to a childhood of abuse in the juvenile detention centres of Chicago.

Without judgment, Elliott traces a life defined by yearning-for love, for pain, for certainty. His clear words and unflinching gaze reveal the difficulty of simple truths and the possibility of transcendence in the face of unforgivable crimes.

Stephen Elliott grew up a ward of the court in various institutions and group homes in Chicago. He earned his Bachelors degree at the University of Illinois and a Masters degree from Northwestern University. He has worked as a stripper, a cabdriver, a bartender, and a law school admissions consultant. Stephen is the Truman Capote Fellow in the Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Program at Stanford University.