The Heroic Art of Losing

The Heroic Art of Losing is Michael Cunningham's warm, perceptive, riotously funny, essayistic depiction of life as a loser in a world where only winning is socially acceptable.A series of interconnected, tragicomic essays about life, love and losing, it's a book of short stories that combine anecdotes with opinions, comedy with gravity and the personal with the universal. It is, to varying degrees, funny, serious, trivial, angry, anecdotal and entertaining. At its core, it's a story about losing. Losing in all the ways that it's possible to lose without ever losing perspective and without ever losing hope. It's about embracing defeat and perhaps making it taste just a little bit better than it's supposed to.It's the story of a 29-year-old boy, who just doesn't want to win. Not in love, not in career, not in sport and not in life. Because he finds losing far more interesting and infinitely more fun.