Joy Williams – författare

A National Book Award-winning satire about the unchecked power of American capitalism, written more than three decades before the 2008 financial crisis.At the center of J R is J R Vansant, a very average sixth grader from Long Island with torn sneakers, a runny nose, and a juvenile fascination with junk-mail get-rich-quick offers. Responding to one, he sees a small return; soon, he is running a paper empire out of a phone booth in the school hallway. Everyone from the school staff to the municipal government to the squabbling heirs of a player-piano company to the titans of Wall Street and the politicians in Washington will be caught up in the endlessly ballooning bubble of the J R Family of Companies.First published in 1975 and winner of the National Book Award in 1976, J R is an appallingly funny and all-too-prophetic depiction of America’s romance with finance. It is also a book about suburban development and urban decay, divorce proceedings and disputed wills, the crumbling facade of Western civilization and the impossible demands of love and art, with characters ranging from the earnest young composer Edward Bast to the berserk publicist Davidoff. Told almost entirely through dialogue, William Gaddis’s novel is both a literary tour de force and an unsurpassed reckoning with the way we live now.

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 offerHere 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.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Misanthropic Alice is a budding eco-terrorist; Corvus has dedicated herself to mourning; Annabel is desperate to pursue an ordinary American life of indulgences. Misfit and motherless, they share an American desert summer of darkly illuminating signs and portents. In locales as mirrored strange as a nursing home where the living dead are preserved, to a wildlife museum where the dead are presented as living, the girls attend to their future. A remarkable attendant cast of characters, including a stroke survivor whose soulmate is a vivisected monkey, an aging big-game hunter who finds spiritual renewal in his infatuation with an eight-year-old–the formidable Emily Bliss Pickles–and a widower whose wife continues to harangue him, populate this gloriously funny and wonderfully serious novel where the dead are forever infusing the living, and all creatures strive to participate in eternity.From the Trade Paperback edition.

With her singular brand of gorgeous dark humor, Joy Williams explores the various ways–comic, tragic, and unnerving—we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss. A masseuse breaks her rich client''s wrist bone, a friend visits at the hospital long after she is welcome, and a woman surrenders her husband to a creepily adoring student. From one of our most acclaimed writers, Honored Guest is a rich examination of our capacity for transformation and salvation.

Stories deal with a young divorcee, a shared summer home, a troubled family, a wedding, childhood fears, the death of a pet, a lying child, and enlightenment.

A book about violence and redemption, Joy Williams'' new fiction tells the story of two drifters who break into Florida vacation homes while their owners are away, live there a while, then move on.

Nominated for the National Book Award in 1974, this 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 fines and most provocative writers.

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE STORY PRIZE • NAMED A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST • A razor-sharp new collection of stories of visionary childhood misfits and struggling adult dreamers from this legendary writer of “perfectly indescribable fiction . . . To read Williams is to look into the abyss” (The Atlantic). “An American master is back with crystalline stories that map the personal and political minefields of her unmoored characters. Williams blends everyday dramas with surreal imagery, her voice and range inspiring awe.” —Boston Globe“Night was best, for, as everyone knows but does not tell, the sobbing of the earth is most audible at night.” “Men are but unconscious machines and they perform their cruelties so effortlessly.” “Caring was a power she’d once possessed but had given up freely.” The sentences of Joy Williams are like no others—the coiled wit, the sense of a confused and ruined landscape, even the slight whisper of hope that lurks between the words—for the scrupulous effort of telling, in these stories, has a ravishing beauty that belies their subjects. We meet lost souls such as the twin sister heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune in “After the Haiku Period,” who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family’s deeds; in “Nettle,” we encounter a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence; and in the final story, we learn of the “pelican child” who lives with the “bony, ill-tempered” Baba Iaga “in a little hut on chicken legs.”All of these characters insist on exploring an indifferent and caustic world. They struggle against our degradation of the climate and of each other, possibly in vain. But each brief, haunted triumph of understanding is celebrated by Williams, a writer for our time and all time.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

'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.

''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.

At a hot-dog-eating contest or at a demolition derby, in line at the pharmacy counter waiting for a shingles vaccination, living in a cave with a colony of bats: the Almighty appears in ever-more mysterious ways in Ninety-Nine Stories of God, Joy Williams'' surreal, sublime new collection of very short short stories. Each less than a page long, each packing a punch belied by its size, every one of these ninety-nine stories tells of everyday human interaction with an increasingly elusive and arbitrary deity.Haunted by an array of extraordinary historical figures, from Kafka and Tolstoy to O. J. Simpson and Philip K. Dick, but populated by anonymous ordinary people just like you and me, the stories pool seemingly random moments into something deep, dazzling and disconcerting. Bleak and funny, ironic and lyrical, enigmatic and aphoristic, Ninety-Nine Stories of God breaks down the barriers between the everyday and the divine and takes Williams'' writing into territories strange and new.

When we first meet Pearl - young in years but advanced in her drinking - she''s sitting at a hotel bar in Florida, throwing back gin and tonics. Cradled in the crook of her arm is her infant son. But 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 drinking might dull the latter but it spurs on the former. Through the lens of Pearl''s fragile consciousness, readers encounter the horror and triumph of both childhood and motherhood. With language that flits between exuberance and elegy, the plainspoken and the poetic, Joy Williams has created a modern fairy-tale, entirely original and entirely consuming.

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.

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.