A collection of "uncommonly good stories" (The Chicago Tribune) from a true American master of the short story—disturbing, comic, and moving takes that find deeper meanings in ordinary domestic life. With unforgettable characters, places, and events—a young divorcee, a shared summer home, a troubled family, a wedding, the death of a pet—Williams takes her readers on journey after journey, as only she can.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NOMINEE • This "beautifully crafted" (The New York Times Book Review), haunting, profoundly disquieting novel manages to be at once sparse and lush, to combine Biblical simplicity with Gothic intensity and strangeness. It is the story of Kate, despised by her mother, bound to her father by ties stronger and darker than blood. It is the story of her attempted escapes—in detached sexual encounters, at a Southern college populated by spoiled and perverse beauties, and in a doomed marriage to a man who cannot understand what she is running from. Witty, erotic, searing acute, State of Grace bears the inimitable stamp of one of our finest and most provocative writers.
How to tell the story of a 500-page collection of stories spanning more than forty years? Especially when I really want to just exclaim, "Oh, Oh, OH!" in a state of steadily mounting rapture' Geoff Dyer, ObserverWilliams' uniquely devastating portrayals of modern life have been captivating readers and writers for decades. Here, for the first time, Williams' thirty-three best stories are available in a single volume, together with thirteen new stories that show a writer continuing to mould the form into something strange and new.Bleak but funny, real but surreal, domestic but dangerous, familiar but enigmatic, Joy Williams' stories fray away the fabric at the edge of ordinary experience to reveal the loneliness at the heart of human life.In 'The Lover', a girl suffers a spiritual and physical wasting away; in 'The Visiting Privilege', a visitor finds refuge in her friend's psychiatric ward; in 'Charity', a woman gives a poor family gas money and finds herself marooned in their peculiar world; in 'Another Season' an itinerant man cleanses an island of roadkill; in 'Craving' an alcoholic couple head towards a car crash.The Visiting Privilege represents the culmination of Williams' career and cements her place as the most singular artist of short fiction writing today.
A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection Francine and Freddie live in a little house on the edge of the desert, with not enough money, too many snakes, no coffee, and a very strange gardener named Dennis who wants to start a security cactus ranch and is nursing a lost love. Things are ripe for dissolution. “The Other Week” is a wickedly sharp, darkly humorous story, from one of contemporary fiction’s most singular voices—a National Book Award nominee and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. A selection from Honored Guest, hailed as “Phenomenally interesting. . . . Miraculously and intelligently weird . . . Joy Williams wastes not a word in the stories that she tells” (Chicago Tribune). An eBook short.
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. An exhilarating cast of characters reflects this search, which is not just for home, but for self.
“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 Returning to her legendary short stories, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Joy Williams offers a much-anticipated follow-up to Ninety-Nine Stories of God, which The New York Times Book Review called a “treasure trove of bafflements and tiny masterpieces.” Concerning the Future of Souls balances the extraordinary and the humble, the bizarre and the beatific, as Azrael—transporter of souls and the most troubled and thoughtful of the angels—confronts the holy impossibility of his task, his uneasy relationship with Death, and his friendship with the Devil. Over the course of these ninety-nine illuminations, a collection of connected and disparate beings—ranging from ordinary folk to grand, known figures, such as Jung, Nietzsche, Pythagoras, Bach, and Rilke; to mountains, oceans, dogs, birds, whales, horses, butterflies, a sixty-year-old tortoise, and a chimp named Washoe—experience the varying fate of the soul as each encounters the darkness of transcendence in this era of extinction. A brilliant crash course in philosophy, religion, literature, and culture, Concerning the Future of Souls is an absolution and an indictment, sorrowful and ecstatic. Williams will leave you wonderstruck, pondering the morality of being mortal.
A New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year at Esquire, Seattle Times, Minnesota Star Tribune, Huffington Post, and Publishers Weekly. From “quite possibly America’s best living writer of short stories” (NPR), Ninety-Nine Stories of God finds Joy Williams reeling between the sublime and the surreal, knocking down the barriers between the workaday and the divine. Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Joy Williams has a one-of-a-kind gift for capturing both the absurdity and the darkness of everyday life. In Ninety-Nine Stories of God, she takes on one of mankind’s most confounding preoccupations: the Supreme Being. This series of short, fictional vignettes explores our day-to-day interactions with an ever-elusive and arbitrary God. It’s the Book of Common Prayer as seen through a looking glass—a powerfully vivid collection of seemingly random life moments. The figures that haunt these stories range from Kafka (talking to a fish) to the Aztecs, Tolstoy to Abraham and Sarah, O. J. Simpson to a pack of wolves. Most of Williams’s characters, however, are like the rest of us: anonymous strivers and bumblers who brush up against God in the least expected places or go searching for Him when He’s standing right there. The Lord shows up at a hot-dog-eating contest, a demolition derby, a formal gala, and a drugstore, where he’s in line to get a shingles vaccination. At turns comic and yearning, lyric and aphoristic, Ninety-Nine Stories of God serves as a pure distillation of one of our great artists.
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • From one of our most heralded writers comes the “poetic, disturbing, yet very funny” (The Washington Post Book World) life-and-death adventures of three misfit teenagers in the American desert. Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned landscape eccentric with signs and portents—from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wildlife museum—accompanied by restless, confounded adults. A father lusts after his handsome gardener even as he's haunted (literally) by his dead wife; a heartbroken dog runs afoul of an angry neighbor; a young stroke victim drifts westward, his luck running from worse to awful; a sickly musician for whom Alice develops an attraction is drawn instead toward darker imaginings and solutions; and an aging big-game hunter finds spiritual renewal through his infatuation with an eight-year-old—the formidable Emily Bliss Pickless. With nature thoroughly routed and the ambiguities of existence on full display, life and death continue in directions both invisible and apparent. Gloriously funny and wonderfully serious, The Quick and the Dead limns the vagaries of love, the thirst for meaning, and the peculiar paths by which all creatures are led to their destiny. A panorama of contemporary life and an endlessly surprising tour de force: penetrating and magical, ominous and comic, this is the most astonishing book yet in Joy Williams's illustrious career. Joy Williams belongs, James Salter has written, "in the company of Céline, Flannery O'Connor, and Margaret Atwood.
With a new introduction by Karen Russell, the 40th anniversary edition of The Changeling is a visionary fairy tale and a work of mythic genius by one of our best writers. Forty years later, The Changeling is no less haunting and no less visionary than the day it was published, but it has only become clearer that Joy Williams is a virtuosic stylist and a singular thinker—a genius in every sense of the word. When we first meet Pearl—young in years but advanced in her drinking—she’s on the lam, sitting at a hotel bar in Florida, throwing back gin and tonics with her infant son cradled in the crook of her arm. But her escape is brief, and 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 round-the-clock drinking spurs on the former even if it dulls the latter. And through this lens—Pearl’s fragile consciousness—readers encounter the horror and triumph of both childhood and motherhood in a new light. With language that flits between exuberance and elegy, the plainspoken and the poetic, Joy Williams has blended, as Rick Moody writes, “the arresting improbabilities of magic realism, with the surrealism of the folkloric revival . . . and with the modernist foreboding of Under the Volcano,” and created something entirely original and entirely consuming.
In her first novel since the Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Quick and the Dead, 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.
Joy Williams offers ninety-nine illuminations on mortality as she brings her powers of observation to Azrael, the Angel of Death and transporter of souls. Balancing the extraordinary and the humble, the bizarre and the beatific, the book presents Azrael as a thoughtful and troubled protagonist as he confronts the holy impossibility of his task, his uneasy relationship with Death and his friendship with the Devil. In this follow-up to Williams' 99 Stories of God, a collection of connected beings - ranging from ordinary people to great artists such as Kafka, Nietzsche, Bach and Rilke to dogs, birds, horses and butterflies - experience the varying fate of the soul, transient yet everlasting. Profound, sorrowful, witty and ecstatic, Concerning the Future of Souls will leave readers awestruck in their confrontation of life in the face of death.
The Florida Keys: A History & Guide is an engaging handbook to the unique coral and limestone islands that curve southwest off the tip of Florida. Acclaimed novelist and Florida resident Joy Williams traces U.S. Highway 1 from Key Largo to Key West, combining the best of local legend—colorful stories you won’t find in other guidebooks—with insightful commentary and the most up-to-date advice on where to stay, eat, and wander. Along the way, you will: • explore the exquisite underwater world of North America’s only living reef • discover the beautiful bridges that span the Keys, the forts, and the distinctive “conch” architecture of Key West • experience the eerie serenity of Florida Bay’s “backcountry” and the unique ecology of the Keys • visit the Key West cemetery and learn about the lives of some of the Keys’ eccentrics—writers, madmen, and entrepreneurs with various delusions • find the best (and avoid the worst) cafés, inns, and other establishments that the Keys have to offer Here is the most thorough and candid guide to the Keys, one of the most surprising locales in America. With insight and style, Joy Williams shares with us all of the region’s idiosyncrasies and delights.
Most of us watch with mild concern the fast disappearing wild spaces or the recurrence of pollution - related crises such as oil spills, toxic blooms in fertilizer-enriched rivers, and the increasing violence in our own country. Joy Williams does much more than watch. With guts and passion, she sounds the alarm over the general disconnection from the natural world that our consumer culture has created. The culling of elephants, electron-probed chimpanzees, and the vanishing wetlands are just some of her subjects. Razor-sharp, controversial, scathingly opinionated, and refreshingly unafraid of conflict, Williams refuses to compromise as she lashes out at the greed of Americans and decries our own turpitude. It is not enough to mourn the passing of the natural world, Ill Nature shouts. Get out of our homes and our cars and our cubicles and do something...now.
Olivia is a darling seven year old little girl who wants to be a princess. Unfortunately, with the help of her classmates, she doesn't think she can be one, simply because she wears glasses. What makes it worse is that Olivia has never seen a princess with glasses either. After ending up on an accidental journey that leads her to a world of different people and things, she realizes that being different really isn't so bad at all, its actually Extra-Ordinary.
Features twelve stories including the tales of a swami whose spiritual predictions extend to the Florida orange crop, and a woman who objects to her husband's automotive installation
From azure coastlines to primeval swampland, from pastel playgrounds to exotic flowers and wildlife, this delicious photographic tour serves up a feast of tropical treats for the senses.
(B&W) A Daily Dose of Inspiration: Quotes and Thoughts to Inspire was inspired by the challenges and persecution I faced after a marriage break up. It was conceived from the encouragement of friends and family who thanked me for my quotes and thoughts which I posted daily on social media and also sent via messages to them during times of hardships and trials. It aims to Inspire and Encourage anyone who sometimes lack in self-belief and confidence, for anyone who sometimes think about Giving Up. A Daily Dose of Inspiration: Quotes and Thoughts to Inspire speaks to you from the heart and from very real experiences.
About the Book From Chicago to the bright lights of Las Vegas, this memoir tells the tale of a woman who had a tough life but tried to make the most of it. Through the ups and downs her determination helped her pull through to the end.
Do you hunger to have a sense of where you are in God's process, purpose, principles, and power at each crossroad in your life? Do you long to travel life's journey with caring, friendly companions, a well-tested compass, and a trustworthy map? If so, then Friendship MAPS: A Journey through Maturity, Aspirations, Perspectives, and Struggles will point you in the right direction. Friendship is filled with possibilities, and the nature of our friendships often changes throughout our lives. It is a worthwhile endeavor to explore the potential that this person-to-person dynamic holds for each of us. By examining the scope of our maturity, aspirations, perspectives, and struggles (MAPS), we can see how these factors relate to our heart connections. Using the MAPS approach, you can explore the significance of your choices, the threat of superficiality, and the sufficiency of God's grace as you seek to connect your heart with His and others. Just like the road maps stored in our cars or the GPS in our dashboard, Friendship MAPS provides markers for where we are and where we are going as we relate to those around us. The path that will lead us to good friendships is sometimes a rocky one. Therefore, it helps to have an excellent guidebook. With its solid foundation in biblical truth, Friendship MAPS: A Journey through Maturity, Aspirations, Perspectives, and Struggles fits the bill. Joy Williams has enjoyed over thirty years of friendships spanning geographical, generational, and cultural lines. Her commitment to Christ, coupled with the grace He has given her in life experiences, fuels her passion for each one of us to enjoy fulfilling friendships guided by God's purposes. Joy lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with her husband, Brady, and their son. www.mapsinchrist.com
The Florida Keys: A History & Guide is an engaging handbook to the unique coral and limestone islands that curve southwest off the tip of Florida. Acclaimed novelist and Florida resident Joy Williams traces U.S. Highway 1 from Key Largo to Key West, combining the best of local legend—colorful stories you won’t find in other guidebooks—with insightful commentary and the most up-to-date advice on where to stay, eat, and wander. Along the way, you will: • explore the exquisite underwater world of North America’s only living reef • discover the beautiful bridges that span the Keys, the forts, and the distinctive “conch” architecture of Key West • experience the eerie serenity of Florida Bay’s “backcountry” and the unique ecology of the Keys • visit the Key West cemetery and learn about the lives of some of the Keys’ eccentrics—writers, madmen, and entrepreneurs with various delusions • find the best (and avoid the worst) cafés, inns, and other establishments that the Keys have to offer Here is the most thorough and candid guide to the Keys, one of the most surprising locales in America. With insight and style, Joy Williams shares with us all of the region’s idiosyncrasies and delights.
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