The Bliss of Your Attention

A powerful story collection that celebrates those who strive and fail and strive again. Winner of the American Fiction Award ( Short Story Fiction) by the American Book FestIf Joseph Campbell's dictum—"follow your bliss"—has become inspiration and goad, accusation and cliché, then the characters in David Borofka's The Bliss of Your Attention are all the more puzzled by what their futures portend. Their bliss is never clear nor independent of others, for the characters in these stories are ever in search of connection, understanding, and validation, even if the latter—unlike reality and cynicism—is in short supply. As the narrator of "Live with It" tells her would-be novelist husband, "Learn to live with your disappointments." "I mean," she thinks, "I could give him the party line, you know, follow your bliss, etc., etc., but that's where the disappointments come from, don't they? I mean that's where bliss leads if you're no good at the thing that you think makes you happy." Borofka, whose collection A Longing for Impossible Things was selected by the American Book Fest as the 2021 winner of the American Fiction Award for the Short Story, masterfully charts the spectrum of human emotion and the difficulty of connection in these pages. Hapless and bumbling though they may be, the characters in The Bliss of Your Attention continue to move forward despite all evidence to the contrary. As novelist Peter Manseau noted, "The comedy of seeking is rarely so sympathetically portrayed as in Borofka's hands; he captures perfectly the poignancy of dopey mortals dreaming and scheming to reach the divine."