Joy Williams – författare

Williams tackles a host of controversial subjects in this collection of nineteen impassioned essays dealing mostly with humanity's abuses of the natural world.

'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.

Shortlisted for the 2022 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic FictionA Sunday Times Book of the YearA Times Paperback of the Year 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.'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 Dalí, Kafka and Yorgos Lanthimos.' ObserverWinner of the 2021 Kirkus Prize for FictionShortlisted for the 2022 LA Times PrizeLonglisted for the PEN/ Jean Stein Book AwardKhristen 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.

'Filled with humour, canny allusion, beauty, and a profundity born of glimpsing human lives' New Yorker Book of the Year 2024'Williams is one of the most pioneering fiction writers of our time' Andrew Motion, New Statesman Book of the Year 2024'Witty, peculiar and brilliant' Telegraph Christmas Pick 2024'A book completed by a master of the craft. Prepare to be moved' Guardian'Holy, gorgeous and politically red-hot masterpieces' Daily Telegraph'An intricate, perfectly articulated work of art' Times Literary SupplementJoy 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.

Nominated for the PEN/Jean Stein Book AwardLauded as the best story writer of our time, Joy Williams returns with a taut collection that responds to our modern dilemmas with her signature dry wit and deftness of touch. In sinister and shifting landscapes, we meet souls lost and found: from the twin heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune, who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family's deeds, to a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence, to the "pelican child", who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs. For readers of Lorrie Moore, Mary Gaitskill and George Saunders, these haunted stories examine the instincts separating us from the beastly and the divine.