{"title":"Joy Williams","description":"JOY WILLIAMS is the author of five previous novels--including Harrow, a finalist for the PEN\/Jean Stein and the Los Angeles Times book prizes, and The Quick and the Dead,  a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize--as well as four collections of stories. Her book of essays, Ill Nature,  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.","products":[{"product_id":"the-changeling-paperback","title":"The Changeling - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAlmost half a century later, \u003ci\u003eThe Changeling\u003c\/i\u003e remains as haunting and as visionary as on the day it was first published. Joy Williams is a virtuosic stylist and a singular thinker―a genius in every sense of the word.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen we first meet Pearl--young in years but advanced in her drinking--she's on the lam, sitting at a hotel bar in Florida, throwing back gin and tonics with her infant son cradled in the crook of her arm. But her escape is brief, and 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 round-the-clock drinking spurs on the former even if it dulls the latter. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eWith \u003ci\u003eThe Changeling\u003c\/i\u003e, Joy Williams has blended, as Rick Moody writes, \"the arresting improbabilities of magic realism, with the surrealism of the folkloric revival . . . and with the modernist foreboding of \u003ci\u003eUnder the Volcano\u003c\/i\u003e,\" and created something entirely original and entirely consuming.","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50102212657375,"sku":"9781963108903","price":18.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/PrABXD71Y_9781963108903.webp?v=1781079152"},{"product_id":"the-pelican-child-stories-hardcover","title":"The Pelican Child: Stories - Hardcover","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eLONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD - 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\" (\u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e).\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\"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 other--the coiled wit, the sense of a confused and ruined landscape, even the slight chortle of hope that lurks between the words--for the scrupulous effort of telling, in these eleven stories, has a ravishing beauty that belies their substance. We meet lost souls like 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,\" a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence; the ghost of George Gurdieff, on an obsessive visit to the Arizona birthplace of the shining Susan Sontag; the \"pelican child\" who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eAll of these characters insist on exploring, often at their peril, an indifferent and caustic world: they struggle against our degradation of the climate, of each other, and of honest human experience (\"I try to relate only to what is immediately verifiable,\" says one narrator ruefully), possibly in vain. But each brief, haunted triumph of understanding is celebrated by Williams, a writer for our time and all time.","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50102592143583,"sku":"9780525657583","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/7rlVFmjSDh9780525657583.webp?v=1781083549"}],"url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/collections\/joy-williams.oembed","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}