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.
Winner of the 2021 Kirkus Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award
Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked for greatness as a baby when she died for a moment, then came back to life. After Khristen's boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and her mother disappears, she ranges across the dead landscape and finds 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.
Rivetingly strange and delivered with Williams' searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is a tale of paradise lost and the reasons to try and recover something of it.
“One of America's greatest living writers…Williams's work is beautiful, bewildering.” FINANCIAL TIMES
“One of the great writers of her generation.” NEW YORK TIMES
“When the book was over, I missed the awful, cleansing darkness of its eyes upon me.” NEW YORKER, Books of the Year 2021
“A magnificent and moving novel [that excavates] the middle distance between silence and experience . . . Harrow is a piece of writing in the vein of Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka, its humor weaponized by rage.” DAVID L. ULIN ? Los Angeles Times
“A blackly comic portrait of futility . . . This is sarcasm of a high, artistic order, reminiscent of no one quite so much as William Gaddis.” SAM SACKS ? WALL STREET JOURNAL
“Cracked, morbidly hilarious ... a splintered vision of environmental collapse that seems somehow both gleefully nihilistic and yearningly spiritual.” WALL STREET JOURNAL Top Ten Books of 2021
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' 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. "These stories are 100 percent Williams: funny, unsettling, and mysterious, to be puzzled over and enjoyed across multiple readings."-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The legendary writer's first collection in more than ten years, 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 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 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 in this definitive collection.
"The Visiting Privilege is a fifty-course, full-tilt tasting menu of misanthropy and guile...[and] solidifies her position as a thorny American writer of the first rank...This is a writer who sees deeply into the hearts of things [and her] stories transmit a deep feeling for life's transience."-New York Times
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