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Delaney Nolan

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup 2026 Delaney Nolan
© Bryan Tarnowski

© Bryan Tarnowski

Delaney Nolan received her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Rona Jaffe fellow. She has since received a Pushcart Prize, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, and a Fulbright Fellowship in fiction; her fiction has appeared in Electric Literature, Guernica, Indiana Review, Oxford American, Tin House, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere, and has been adapted into a radio play and a short film. She has reported for The Guardian, The Nation, and Al Jazeera. Happy Bad is her first novel.

 

 

Schedule

10:00 am to 10:45 am
State Library, First Floor, Seminar Center
National Book Foundation Presents Social Satire
Ben Fountain, Rasputin Swims the Potomac: A Novel
T. Geronimo Johnson, The Occidental Book of the Dead: A Novel
with moderator Delaney Nolan

12:45 pm to 1:45 pm
State Library, Fifth Floor, Capitol View Room
Ungovernable: Novels of Women Fighting for Survival, Agency, and Control
Victoria Dillon, Ava: A Novel
Donna Everhart, Women of a Promiscuous Nature: A Novel
Delaney Nolan, Happy Bad: A Novel
with moderator April Blevins Pejic

2:00 pm to 2:45 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

Happy Bad: A Novel

"Nolan is a skillful satirist, and one whose aim is extensive, wickedly funny and true." — New Orleans Times-Picayune

"A self-assured debut that is also a warning." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Delaney Nolan has written a brutal, joyful, surprising, and gorgeous novel of human contradictions. It’s a stunner." — Julia Phillips, author of Bear and Disappearing Earth

Hernan Diaz meets Ottessa Moshfegh in this madcap road trip chronicle; a moving display of human connection in the face of violence and climate destruction from a remarkable new voice in fiction.

Beatrice works at Twin Bridge, a chronically underfunded residential treatment center in near-future East Texas, teeming with enraged teenage girls on either too many or not enough drugs. On a normal day, it’s difficult for Beatrice and the other staff—Arda, Carmen, and Linda—to keep their cool in dust-blown Askewn. But when a heat wave triggers a massive, sustained blackout, Beatrice and the other staff and residents must evacuate. Facing police brutality, sweltering heat, panicked evacuees, the girls’ mounting withdrawal, and the consequences of her own lies, they search for a route out of the blackout zone. A catastrophe novel by turns tender and hilarious, fueled by a low-simmering political rage, Happy Bad is a rocket arrived on Earth.