Harrow

Joy Williams Press Reviews

'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

'As our world disintegrates, it will take what we think of as reality with it. Addressing this in fiction will be the job, partly, of a certain kind of modern mystic. Williams, great virtuoso of the unreal is one of them' Sam Byers - Guardian

'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

'Harrow's dark humour, nihilism and absurdist bent bear the author's idiosyncratic stamp [there are] glistening nuggets of humour and wordplay amid the doom'  The Irish Times

'Harrow belongs at the front of the pack of recent climate fiction . A crabby, craggy, comfortless, arid, erudite, obtuse, perfect novel, a singular entry in a singular body of work by an artist of uncompromised originality and vision .  To read this novel is to know and to be known (Galatians 4:9) by a profound and comfortless alterity, to encounter the cosmic otherness at the very core of the self' Justin Taylor - Bookforum

'Death-haunted and perfectly indescribable fiction. To read Williams is to look into the abyss. She remains our great prophet of nothingness' Anthony Domestico - Atlantic

'The ridiculous, pigheaded, bemused, endlessly distracted and continuously self-sabotaging state of the future is the subject of this wonderfully goading satire.  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

'Elegantly deranged. A hypnotizing novel, funny in places and chilling in others, filled with wacky and tragic characters, that unspools the absurdity in just one of our many very possible bad futures' Emily Temple - Literary Hub

'Williams's tone achiev[es] a new, perfectly hostile register.  Her vision of an annihilated earth seems to have flown from the brain of Francisco Goya.  As the novel continues, it plumbs ever-deeper zones of dystopian weirdness. She practices a kind of hallucinogenic realism, which takes at face value the psychological flights of characters deranged by loss. Williams has long written to the side of conventional English, pursuing a form that feels more commensurate with actual experience-with the terror, comedy, and mystery of moving through the world' Katy Waldman - New Yorker

'Who better than Williams to capture pure-hearted but absurd efforts to retrieve paradise lost?'  The Millions

'Climate collapse is well underway and Joy Williams's Harrow deserves the Pulitzer Prize' Bookforum

'The return of an American original. Odd, witty and original'  Guardian 2022 in books highlights

'Brilliant and inspiring. Anyone new to her has a treat in store'  The Times

'Among the strangest, most exciting authors at work today'  Daily Mail

Praise for Joy Williams: 'One of the great writers of her generation' - The New York Times

'To read Joy Williams is to be arrested in a state of relentless awe and wonderment. Why we aren't worshipping Joy Williams in public squares is beyond me'  Vanity Fair

'Deep, dazzling, disconcerting' Adam Foulds

'Joy Williams is simply a wonder' Raymond Carver

'Electric and dangerously human'  Philip Hensher

'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

'Beautiful. It's all pleasure, if pleasure of a bleak and violent sort. It's also often pretty funny, in a deadpan way' Christian Lorentzen - Daily Telegraph

'Her works are almost a well-kept secret. They should be much more widely read. Williams is a writer for our times: both visionary and caustic, knowing yet also full of wonder... Harrow's short, dense pages unfold into a world of Kafkaesque distortion, its sharp wit and cruelty pierced with dreamlike language and imagery, and moments of almost unbearable poignancy. As the book draws to its dark conclusion, a hint of something miraculous, borne out from its opening chapter, flutters over the final paragraphs. In Williams's shattered world, destruction appears almost like the possibility of renewal'  Financial Times

'Harrow is unyielding in its moral purpose and raucously impious in its methods. She has the syntactic equivalent of perfect pitch'  the TLS

'When the book was over, I missed the awful, cleansing darkness of its eyes upon me' New Yorker Books of the Year 2021

'This is the apocalypse as reimagined by a committee headed by Dali, Kafka and Yorgos Lanthimos.' Observer Winner of the 2021 Kirkus Prize for Fiction Shortlisted for the 2022 LA Times Prize Longlisted for the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award