Happy Happy Rock day! Happy Rock is a book of stories by Matthew Simmons, seen at left wearing a shirt that’s about Michigan or something. If you have ever walked home through snowdrifts in the wrong shoes, and the only thing keeping your knees above collapse was the thought of your cat or your twelve-sided die, you will hold Happy Rock as tenderly as Matthew does in this picture. Except it will be open and you will be reading it. Everything is a kind of love story if by love you mean grey sand.

You will read it and be sighing because it’s right, it’s right, over and over again it’s smart and sad and correct. Here is a mention of a story way from the scarred beaches of 2010. And here is my favorite paragraph besides the ending from “Rabbit Fur Coat,” a story from Happy Rock that just went live a few days ago on The Collagist:

“Back home Boy went to the bathroom. Younger, he played a game where he had to leave the bathroom before the refilling of the toilet ended, imagining it as the countdown to an explosion. Older, he didn’t mind, but sometimes saw himself blown through the wall; ripped apart by hot, swift gusts of fiery air; scattered; his fingers embedded in the plaster; the bones of his toes like nails into the floor; his teeth, shrapnel. Now he rubbed his eyes. His grandmother knocked on the door to call him to the dinner table.”