Honored Guest: Stories

The first collection of stories in well over a decade by a writer Ann Beattie has called “one of our most remarkable storytellers,” and whom Bret Easton Ellis has named “the rightful heir to the mastery, genius, and poetry of Flannery O’Connor.”

These twelve stories further Joy Williams’s utterly singular achievement, described by the Washington Post as “poetic, disturbing, yet very funny . . . the brilliantly controlled style informed by a powerful spiritual vision,” and again reveal her ability to uncover, as Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times, “the somber verities lurking beneath the flash and clamor of daily life.”

Her landscapes reach from Maine and Nantucket to the Southwest and into Mexico and Guatemala, while the events cover a range of human travail, from children confronting the death of a parent to parents instead burying their own young, and the various ways–comic, tragic, unnerving–we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss. And all of her characters are richly, idiosyncratically alive, in circumstances at once supremely peculiar and strangely like our own.