Joy Williams

"In her first novel since The Quick and the Dead, the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after the environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic. Once nature as we know it is dead, the pursuit of happiness fades into insignificance, food is scarce, and even time doesn't progress in an organized fashion. Harrow follows the picaresque journey of Khristen--a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen's failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she washes up at a "resort" on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call "Big Girl." In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature's beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this "baggy seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth"? Rivetingly strange and beautiful, delivered with Williams's searing, deadpan wit, their intertwined tale of paradise lost serves to commit us anew to that paradise, and to their reasons--against all reasonableness--to try and recover something of it"--

A Novel

Harrow

Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, three misfit, motherless teanage girls, form an unlikely circle of friendship in the Arizona desert as they search for meaning, identity, and their own individual paths in the world. By the author of State of Grace. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

The Quick and the Dead

The legendary writer's first collection in more than ten years--and, finally, the definitive one. A literary event of the highest order. Joy Williams has been celebrated as a master of the short story for four decades, her renown passing as a given from one generation to the next even in the shifting landscape of contemporary writing. And at long last the incredible scope of her singular achievement is put on display: thirty-three stories drawn from three earlier, much lauded collections, and another thirteen appearing here for the first time in book form. Forty-six stories in all, far and away the most comprehensive volume in her long career, showcasing her crisp, elegant prose, her dark wit, and her uncanny ability to illuminate our world through characters and situations that feel at once peculiar and foreign and disturbingly familiar. Virtually all American writers have their favorite Joy Williams stories, as do many readers of all ages, and each one of them is available here.

New and Collected Stories

The Visiting Privilege

Journeying from such settings as Nantucket to the Southwest and Central America, this collection of short fiction features twelve stories that explore how diverse characters--from grown children confronting the end of their parents' lives to teenagers dealing with sudden death--cope with the travails, tragedies, and challenges of life. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Stories

Honored Guest

A young woman who has managed to remain emotionally aloof from her possessive father and disturbed mother finally marries only to find herself the center of a new tragedy

State of Grace

Follows drifters and housebreakers Willie and Liberty on their journey through Florida, their separation, and the growing realization that their odyssey is heading toward danger

Breaking and Entering

The Changeling

99 Stories of God

Stories deal with a young divorcee, a shared summer home, a troubled family, a wedding, childhood fears, the death of a pet, a lying child, and enlightenment

Short Stories

Taking Care

When we first meet Pearl - young in years but advanced in her drinking - she's sitting at a hotel bar in Florida, throwing back gin and tonics. Cradled in the crook of her arm is her infant son. But the relief she feels at having fled her abusive husband, and the Northeastern island his family calls home, doesn't last for long. Soon she's being shepherded back. The island, for Pearl, is a place of madness and pain, and her drinking might dull the latter but it spurs on the former. Through the lens of Pearl's fragile consciousness, readers encounter the horror and triumph of both childhood and motherhood. With language that flits between exuberance and elegy, the plainspoken and the poetic, Joy Williams has created a modern fairy-tale, entirely original and entirely consuming.

Iyilik

At a hot-dog-eating contest or at a demolition derby, in line at the pharmacy counter waiting for a shingles vaccination, living in a cave with a colony of bats: the Almighty appears in ever-more mysterious ways in Ninety-Nine Stories of God, Joy Williams' surreal, sublime new collection of very short short stories. Each less than a page long, each packing a punch belied by its size, every one of these ninety-nine stories tells of everyday human interaction with an increasingly elusive and arbitrary deity. Haunted by an array of extraordinary historical figures, from Kafka and Tolstoy to O. J. Simpson and Philip K. Dick, but populated by anonymous ordinary people just like you and me, the stories pool seemingly random moments into something deep, dazzling and disconcerting. Bleak and funny, ironic and lyrical, enigmatic and aphoristic, Ninety-Nine Stories of God breaks down the barriers between the everyday and the divine and takes Williams' writing into territories strange and new.

Ninety-Nine Stories of God

"Quite possibly America's best living writer of short stories."--NPR "Williams is a writer for our times: both visionary and caustic, knowing yet also full of wonder."--Catherine Taylor, The Financial Times

Concerning the Future of Souls

In her first novel since The Quick and the Dead (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic. "She practices ... camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams’s imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colorations in the ecology around her.” —A.O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen’s failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she ranges across the dead landscape and washes up at a “resort” on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call “Big Girl.” In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature’s beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this “gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, an army of the aged and ill, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth”? Rivetingly strange and beautiful, and delivered with Williams’s searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is their intertwined tale of paradise lost and of their reasons—against all reasonableness—to try and recover something of it.

A novel

A collection of Williams's short stories focuses on the disturbing, comic, moving, and revealing facets of ordinary domestic life in such tales as "The Farm," "Building," "The Woods," and "Preparation For a Collie"

From "a brilliant spawn of Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Connor" (Elle) comes a novel starring an exhilarating cast of characters that reflects the search, not just for home, but for self. Willie and Liberty are drifters. They break into Florida vacation homes while the owners are away, stay a while, and then move on. They have been lovers since they were teenagers, yet Liberty now senses that Willie is drifting away from her—that their search, so relentless and mysterious, is becoming increasingly dangerous.

A compilation of ten essays and stories exploring the devastating impact of the American lifestyle on nature offers a scathing look at consumer culture and its ever increasing disconnection from the natural world, covering such topics as as hunting, animal rights, having babies, pollution, and disappearing wild spaces. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals

Ill Nature

“Night was best, for, as everyone knows, but does not tell, the sobbing of the earth is most audible at night.” “Men are but unconscious machines and they perform their cruelties so effortlessly.” “Caring was a power she’d once possessed but had given up freely.” The sentences of Joy Williams are like no other—the coiled wit, the sense of a confused and ruined landscape, even the slight chortle of hope that lurks between the words—for the scrupulous effort of telling, in these eleven stories, has a ravishing beauty that belies their substance. We meet lost souls like the twin-sister heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune in “After the Haiku Period,” who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family’s deeds; in “Nettle,” a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence; the ghost of George Gurdieff, on an obsessive visit to the Arizona birthplace of the shining Susan Sontag; the “pelican child” who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs. 

All of these characters insist on exploring, often at their peril, an indifferent and caustic world: they struggle against our degradation of the climate, of each other, and of honest human experience (“I try to relate only to what is immediately verifiable,” says one narrator ruefully), possibly in vain. But each brief, haunted triumph of understanding is celebrated by Williams, a writer for our time and all time.

Joy Williams

Books

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