JOY WILLIAMSais 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. From the Hardcover edition.
“By one of the most celebrated American short-story writers. . .
these forty-six stories are powerful, important, compassionate, and
full of dark humor. This is a book that will be reread with
admiration and love many times over.” —Nicole Jones, Vanity
Fair
“This volume traces Joy Williams’s journey to sui generis master.
Her nearest cousin among American writers is Don DeLillo, but only
because, as with him, nobody writes sentences like she does. . . .
Though she treats common states—parenthood, pet ownership,
alcoholism—Williams eschews the realist story writer’s bromide that
in the ordinary we find the extraordinary, because there’s nothing
ordinary about her work.” —Christian Lorentzen, New York
“A fifty-course, full-tilt tasting menu of misanthropy and guile.
This career-spanning collection solidifies Ms. Williams’s position
as a thorny American writer of this first rank. Dire circumstances
blend with offbeat wit in Ms. Williams’s work. The mental heat they
give off places them at the far end of the Scoville scale, yet they
are plump with soul and real feeling.” —Dwight Garner, “The Top
Books of 2015,” The New York Times
“Such brilliant and depressing fiction that after I read it I was
nervous to ever try writing again. . . . Hope is very damaged
in these pages, but you will find yourself laughing out loud as you
muffle a gasp of crippled optimism. I am a real Johnny-come-lately
to Joy Williams, but since finishing this new collection I have run
out and bought every book she ever wrote. You should, too.” —John
Waters, The San Francisco Chronicle
“Joy Williams has long been one of America’s greatest living
writers, and The Visiting Privilege might [be] the best book of the
year. Her sentences are as sharp and precise as scalpel incisions,
and her ability to turn the real beautifully surreal is second to
none. . . . If you have yet to read Williams’s work, there is no
better place to start than this book, which collects stories from
across her decades of groundbreaking work alongside several new
stories.” —Lincoln Michael, Editor-in-Chief, Electric
Literature
“[This] is powerfully united by Joy Williams’s profound gift for
illuminating, with compassion and mordant humor, characters on the
jagged edge of grief and spiritual ruin. . . . The search for mercy
is at odds with a landscape that is increasingly merciless—and yet
hope remains [and]the stories are rich with tenderness. . . . The
Visiting Privilege is also laced with Williams’s trademark cutting
wit, which provides a small release, as of steam escaping through a
pressure valve, while also pushing the stories' dark absurdity.”
—Laura Van Den Berg, O Magazine
“Immaculate artistry [and] one of the most fearless,
abyss-embracing literary projects our literature has seen [with]
the sort of helpless laughter that erupts when a profound moral
project is conducted with such blinding literary craft. . . . If
Williams keeps writing fiction—ruthless, hilarious work that holds
our human folly to the fire—the novel and the short story won't
perish anytime soon.” —Ben Marcus, The New York Times Book
Review
“One of the most important and radical books published this
fall. And Joy Williams has been doing it for decades. . . She
will [now] be read more than any point in her career. This is
a great thing, because looking around, we need Joy Williams more
than ever.” —Shane Jones, Vice
“Unquestionably, the short story collection of this year. . . .
Williams has been one of the great living individualists and
masters of the short story [and] lionized in America’s innermost
literary circles. . . . He work can be stark, brutal, creepy,
tragic and hilarious, [and] all forty-six stories here are
magnificently written.” —Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News
“Williams is brilliant in her commentary. . . . To enter The
Visiting Privilege—a mammoth, definitive collection of her
stories—is to smack face-first into astonishment: best words, best
order. But more: One is constantly aware of a taut sensibility
infusing them. Dispassionate but not uncompassionate, this steady,
Flaubertian presence, both witness and engine, demonstrates (beyond
‘mere’ mastery of craft) one sublime measure of literary art. . . .
Seamlessly linked, precise, forceful, they spear the reading ear,
piercing to hard, weird truth. They propose by their very
existence—as much as by the story-freight they deliver—that we
readers follow their lead and drop all artifice.” —Joan Frank, The
San Francisco Chronicle
“The year of Joy Williams. . . [She] writes some of the most
memorably unclassifiable fiction out there [and] can move from
precise realism to disquieting surrealism in a moment’s notice;
she’s an incomparable figure in American literature right now.”
—Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“Hard and bleak and somehow still bitingly funny, a kind of
nihilistic long-form standup-comedy routine. Except you
should sit down for it, and probably keep implements of self-harm
out of reach.” —Ben Marcus, The New Yorker
“This is a writer who gets under your skin [with] the unadorned
truth. . . . She’s absorbed the American experience and has
expressed its sorrows and defeats, as well as its tenacity, with
and directness all her own. Especially when it comes to short form
fiction. Many of her stories have achieved iconic status over the
years. . . . Refreshingly, many of the characters in Williams’s
stories realize it’s time to grow up, to step up, even those living
amid disaster.” —Debra Gwartney, The Oregonian
“The Visiting Privilege assembles stories from as long ago as 1966
and as recently as this summer…. This is a decades-long stack
of stories about people whose balance may never again tippy-toe on
the ocean floor…. When I was young I loved Joy Williams
because I thought she was so hilarious. When I got older I
loved her because she refused to look away.” —Choire Sicha,
Slate
“Unbelievably funny. . . The mental heat [these stories] give off
places them at the far end of the Scoville scale. The Visiting
Privilege is a fifty-course, full-tilt tasting menu of misanthropy
and guile [and] solidifies her position as a thorny American writer
of the first rank. . . . This is a writer who sees deeply into the
hearts of things [and her] stories transmit a deep feeling for
life’s transience.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“[This] publication is sure to be celebrated. . . . Her books have
been finalists for major prizes, including the National Book Award
and the Pulitzer Prize, because she is a fiery writer with a sharp
humor and a dark energy and her sentences are weird, funny, and
full of emotion. . . . These stories have almost a biblical
ambience [and] at times they seems to lift into the realm of tale
or myth. . . . Williams writes about the enormous,
inconvenient human capacity for love, the weighty responsibility of
it, the loneliness of it.” —Deb Olin Unferth, Bookforum
“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
“Our first real opportunity to stand back from Williams’s
particular accomplishments and to see her genius whole. . . . Her
extravagantly original artistic gifts aside, Williams has never
seemed more in accord with the needs of her time.” —Jonathan Dee,
Harper’s
“The Visiting Privilege cements Williams’s position not merely as
one of the great writers of her generation, but as our pre-eminent
bard of humanity’s insignificance.” —Dan Kois, The New York Times
Magazine
“A compilation of rare richness, complexity, and abundance. . .
Encompassing writing from the 1970s to the present, this book is a
savory feast. . . Dissolution and morality [are] old themes for
Williams: the work that grief is, the inevitability of exiting
alone, the discombobulation of once-sharp intellect, even
unintended legacy. . . . Her darkness is dappled with light.”
—Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe
“She has often been anointed as the literary heir to Anton Chekhov
and Flannery O’Connor, but Williams’s voice is most emphatically
her own. Her stories begin realistically enough, then permute into
hallucinatory fairy tales, as grim as anything in Grimm, but also
grimly funny. Some adjective, as proprietary as ‘Kafkaesque,’ is
needed for stories in which murder, addiction and madness are
discussed so dispassionately. The pieces are chilling, but never
smug about their own seriousness. There is a deep pleasure to be
had, and a kind of explosive surprise, in Williams’s unflinching
alchemy. . . . All forty-six stories are spooky and unsentimental.
. . with thirteen superb new stories.” —Lisa Zeidner, The
Washington Post
“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
“An influential and long-revered body of work [by] a wizard of
elegant economy, fearless wit, and sly surprise. Edgy, seductive
concision is one jet to her stories’ appeal; another is her uncanny
ability to illuminate hidden pockets of the human heart.” —Lisa
Shea, Elle
“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.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist
“Four dozen stories by one of the form's greatest practitioners. .
. . If you want to see how the pros do it—or simply want to read
some of the best stories written today—you need look no further.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The escape artists at the heart of Joy Williams' fiction, in the
face of each fresh catastrophe, are like swimmers waiting to get on
with the drowning, their thinking running in odd and unemployable
directions and their weaknesses a terrible precinct they recklessly
frequent. But even as they worry, with good reason,
that their hearts will turn them in, they know we're saved not
because we're worthy but because we're loved. These are
fiercely dark and funny stories.” —Jim Shepard
“Joy Williams stories are uncanny, unsettling and completely
original. It’s hard to catch her in the act of doing
what she does so well, or even to describe it: in my view, she
disorients us in order to renew our sense of how genuinely strange
the world is. She is one of the great American short story
writers.” —Jay McInerney
“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
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