What Happened Was

Katharine Haake

Winner of Nothing Exists Alone fiction series

ed. by Hanna Guido

In KATHARINE HAAKE’S new eco-fable, What Happened Was, emissaries from the postworld return to us with accounts of a future that spooled itself out because we weren’t paying attention. In it, everything looks a lot like now, only a little bit different. Intimate, precarious, often beguiling, sometimes hilarious, and never free of political context, these reports are haunted by loss. Whether parts of the body or children in trees, things disappear in this world without warning or sense as everything fades toward oblivion and dead parents taunt from the grave: What made you think you were so special it wouldn’t happen to you?

PRAISE FOR HAAKE'S WORK

That Water, Those Rocks is like a finely made watch with a transparent case that allows us to look inside and admire not only the beautiful ornamentation but the way it all works.
—LA Times Book Review

With the mesmerizing voice of a natural born-storyteller…Haake equates nature's basic elements (earth, fire, water) with those of mankind (love, livelihood, safety.)
—Booklist

Haake grew up in northern California, and to judge by her new collection she may very well be the West Coast's splendid answer to the glittering stars of New Yorker heaven.
—Library Journal

Original and accomplished . . . Haake's unusual narrative style is what truly sets the collection apart.
—Kirkus

Praise for What Happened Was

“Delight” is the wrong word for the experience of reading these accounts, so stuffed are they with sorrow or loss or injustice, but Haake’s control of her craft is profound. The emotional grip of these tales is firm and fast. Her sentences unroll with enormous facility and grace, and there is great comfort embedded in the telling, as if they are oral history, not fabulist prose. The accounts themselves are hardly comforting, of course. The reader believes they’re enjoying words like yummy and braised and inky and xeriscaping but will read the final page with grief: The world is lost. The stories are over. This is the postworld. —Katharine Coldiron

What Happened Was is a breath of fresh air, a whip-smart response to the factory line of deadly serious apocalyptic novels. Combining literary influences as broad as Barthelme, Allende, and Murakami, Haake dishes out poetic language and a surreal sci-fi vibe that forces us to widen our lenses to take in this weird world we live in. This novel is a pastiche of standalone tales / POVs that casts a spell that will have you staying up late at night, believing in the magic of words.
— Martin Ott, author of Shadow Dance, Regal House Publishing

The “postworld” as revealed in Katharine Haake’s immensely imaginative new book of speculative fiction, What Happened Was, is frightening and inevitable, yet oddly comforting. With playful charm and lyrical prose that sometimes masks the horrors of this new world, Haake takes the reader on an unforgettable tour of landscapes that are both familiar and startlingly new. Provocative and beautifully written, this is a reading experience like no other.
— Clifford Garstang, author of Oliver’s Travels and The Last Bird of Paradise

Katharine Haake's What Happened Was is such a pleasure to read and re-read. With their sometimes haunting, sometimes hilarious, always fantastical tales, these accounts place us on steep literary heights, where we find ourselves looking down at a poignantly despoiled, comically unspooling world. After each story I ended up feeling warm, giddy, very precarious, and hungry for more.—Rod Val Moore