Fortunately, he managed to escape, and he has since travelled throughout Latin America and East Asia.

Will Ferguson was born and raised in the former fur-trapping settlement of Fort Vermilion in the backwoods of northern Canada. Read more plague of HappinessTM? Will Ferguson has created a comic masterpiece, a brutal satire of modern times. But who is Tupac? And how can Edwin stop the world from succumbing to this.

It's all the fault of the mysterious Tupac Soiree, and his book What I Learned on the Mountain. A cartel of drug, alcohol, tobacco and drug-rehab bosses have a contract out on him. While the rest of the country is joining the new HappinessTM cult, Edwin (the wiry, grey-suited, low-level editor at US publisher Panderic Press) is in trouble. When one of those irritating self-help books actually gets it right, then unnatural and worrying times are just around the corner. While the rest of the country is joining the new Happiness TM cult, Edwin (the wiry, grey-suited, low-level editor at US publisher Panderic Press) is in trouble. Agent, Carolyn Swayze.Description for Happiness TM Paperback. This is a richly imagined and at times darkly humorous book, but Ferguson's felicities are undermined by the clunky obviousness of his biggest jokes. Ethics, a former Panderic self-help author who is on the lam from prison, they resolve to find and kill Tupak. Mead are so horrified by the new world they have helped create that, accompanied by Mr. Eventually, the book comes out and becomes a sleeper hit: soon all of America is quitting smoking, drinking, drugging and even reading (except for Tupak's oeuvre). Edwin's editorial ordeals are mitigated by his immediate boss, May Weatherhill, with whom he is carrying on an intermittent affair, although he is married to the insufferable Jenni. Edwin volunteers Tupak's magnum opus, then sets out to retrieve it from the waste system and edit it, a process that proves to be unsettling. Mead, owner of Panderic Books, needs a self-help book to fill a hole in the fall catalogue. The massive and horrible What I Learned on the Mountain, by Rajee Tupak Soiree, arrives in Edwin de Valu's slush pile and is promptly tossed in the garbage by the hapless editor. Though it might seem redundant to satirize the self-help industry, Canadian writer Ferguson ( Hokkaido Highway Blues) makes a heroic effort in his first novel, combining sitcom-like gags about the publishing industry with the truism that if a self-help book ever actually succeeded in its goals, it would wipe out its own market.

Happiness by Will Ferguson