From Powells.com
Our favorite books of the year.
Synopses & Reviews
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 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.
Review
"To read Joy Williams is to be arrested in a state of relentless awe and
wonderment....[Her] preternatural intelligence, coupled with a
scorching wit and an inability to bore or commit an unoriginal thought
to the page, has made her a cult hero....Why we aren't worshipping Joy
Williams in public squares is beyond me. With this collection we should
be." Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair
Review
"Williams is a flawless writer, and The Visiting Privilege is a perfect
book...the rare collection that doesn't have a single story, even a
single paragraph, that's less than brilliant, and it proves that
Williams is quite possibly America's best living writer of short
stories. . . . Even in its darkest moments, [it] is filled with a kind
of hope, even a perverse kind of joy." Michael Schaub, NPR
Review
"A mighty retrospective embracing four decades of daring literary
excellence, precisely calibrated imagination, and uncompromising candor
[by] a virtuoso with a subversive, sure-footed sense of humor and an
unsparing perspective on the marauding strangeness of the human
condition....Jolting, tonic, and valiant in their embrace of the
ludicrous and the tragic, Williams' masterful stories belong in every
fiction collection." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"Joy Williams has been enlightening us for a very long time about the short story but now in her collected stories we see the breadth and power of her vision. This is an important moment for American writing." Thomas McGuane
About the Author
Joy Williams is the author of four novels — the most recent, The Quick and the Dead, was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 — and three other collections of stories, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among her many honors are the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was elected to the Academy in 2008. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming.
Joy Williams on PowellsBooks.Blog
![](https://covers.powells.com/9781101874899.jpg)
1) There should be a clean clear surface with much disturbance below.
2) An anagogical level.
3) Sentences that can stand strikingly alone.
4) An animal within to give its blessing.
5) Interior voices which are ...
Read More»
Joy Williams on PowellsBooks.Blog
![](https://covers.powells.com/9781101874899.jpg)
1) There should be a clean clear surface with much disturbance below.
2) An anagogical level.
3) Sentences that can stand strikingly alone.
4) An animal within to give its blessing.
5) Interior voices which are ...
Read More»