Born in New York City, Gregory Spatz holds degrees from Haverford College, University of New Hampshire, and The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He now lives in Spokane, Washington, where he teaches in the MFA program at the Inland Northwest Center for Writers, Eastern Washington University. Spatz spent his youth in New England, mostly in the Berkshires. 

He is the author of novels Inukshuk (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press), Fiddler's Dream and No One But Us, as well as a short story collection, Wonderful Tricks. His short stories have appeared in literary journals and magazines, and he has published numerous book and music reviews for The Oxford American. He is the winner of a 2012 NEA Literature Fellowship.

Watch the Half as Happy book trailer!

"Spatz writes like a dream." —Publishers Weekly

A grieving couple rents a desperate landlord’s house in an effort to recover lost intimacy. Twins are irrevocably separated by events both beyond and within their control. A nighttime prank and its gruesome aftermath forge human connections no one could have anticipated.

The eight stories in Half as Happy reveal with startling clarity their characters’ secrets, losses, and desires. Each with the depth of a novel, these insightful portraits of the darkness and light within us reverberate long after they’ve ended, like beautiful and disturbing dreams.

“Each story moves and unfolds, deepens and develops beautifully complex textures and moods, not unlike beautiful pieces of music. Spatz has a pitch-perfect ear for the language and an uncanny ability to mine the substance of his characters’ rich lives. These stories are both funny and sad, in the true and inescapable way of real life, full of elegiac beauty. A masterful collection.”
—Brad Watson, author of Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives and The Heaven of Mercury

"These stories generate the quiet thrills of necessity. Being as they are 'ruled equally by the infinitesimal and the grand,' they resemble our own lives, reflect back to us those human circumstances in which we recognize ourselves, our own better and worse impulses, our own greater and lesser dreams. These stories will mend readers' hearts even as they break them and that is what makes them so wonderful and rare."
—Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Tinkers.

"These are beautifully-wrought, haunting stories. Spatz is a marvelous writer, with a keen eye for the secrets of the human heart."
—Dan Chaon, author of Stay Awake

"Gregory Spatz's stories search out the extraordinary complications of human relationships with great intelligence and unexpected finesse, and their resonance lingers with bell-like clarity."
—Erin McGraw, author of The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard