The Visiting Privilege
Title | The Visiting Privilege PDF eBook |
Author | Joy Williams |
Publisher | Vintage |
Pages | 511 |
Release | 2015-09-08 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1101874902 |
The definitive story collection “by one of the most celebrated American short-story writers…. Powerful, important, compassionate, and full of dark humor. This is a book that will be reread with admiration and love many times over” (Vanity Fair). 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. 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.
The Visiting Privilege
Title | The Visiting Privilege PDF eBook |
Author | Joy Williams |
Publisher | Profile Books |
Pages | 550 |
Release | 2016-11-03 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1782833072 |
'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, Observer Williams' 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.
State of Grace
Title | State of Grace PDF eBook |
Author | Joy Williams |
Publisher | Vintage |
Pages | 273 |
Release | 2011-04-13 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 0307787877 |
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NOMINEE • This "beautifully crafted" (The New York Times Book Review), 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 finest and most provocative writers.
Harrow
Title | Harrow PDF eBook |
Author | Joy Williams |
Publisher | Vintage |
Pages | 225 |
Release | 2022-07-05 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1984898809 |
In her first novel since the Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Quick and the Dead, 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. "She practices ... camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams’s imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colorations in the ecology around her.” —A.O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen’s failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she ranges across the dead landscape and washes up at 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. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this “gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, an army of the aged and ill, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth”? Rivetingly strange and beautiful, and delivered with Williams’s searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is their intertwined tale of paradise lost and of their reasons—against all reasonableness—to try and recover something of it.
Taking Care
Title | Taking Care PDF eBook |
Author | Joy Williams |
Publisher | Vintage |
Pages | 269 |
Release | 2010-09-15 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 0307763846 |
A collection of "uncommonly good stories" (The Chicago Tribune) from a true American master of the short story—disturbing, comic, and moving takes that find deeper meanings in ordinary domestic life. With unforgettable characters, places, and events—a young divorcee, a shared summer home, a troubled family, a wedding, the death of a pet—Williams takes her readers on journey after journey, as only she can.
The Privilege of the Sword
Title | The Privilege of the Sword PDF eBook |
Author | Ellen Kushner |
Publisher | Spectra |
Pages | 402 |
Release | 2006-07-25 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 0553902830 |
From the award-winning author of Swordspoint comes a witty, wicked coming-of-age story that is both edgy and timeless. . . . Welcome to Riverside, where the aristocratic and the ambitious battle for power and prestige in the city’s labyrinth of streets and ballrooms, theatres and brothels, boudoirs and salons. Into this alluring and alarming world walks a bright young woman ready to take it on and make her fortune. A well-bred country girl, Katherine knows all the rules of conventional society. Her biggest mistake is thinking they apply. Katherine’s host and uncle, Alec Campion, the capricious and decadent Mad Duke Tremontaine, is in charge here—and to him, rules are made to be broken. When he decides it would be far more amusing for his niece to learn swordplay than to follow the usual path to ballroom and husband, her world changes forever. And there’s no going back. Blade in hand, it’s up to Katherine to find her own way through a maze of secrets and betrayals, nobles and scoundrels—and to gain the power, respect, and self-discovery that come to those who master. . . . “Unholy fun, and wholly fun . . . an elegant riposte, dazzlingly executed.”—Gregory Maguire, New York Times bestselling author of Wicked
Honored Guest
Title | Honored Guest PDF eBook |
Author | Joy Williams |
Publisher | Vintage |
Pages | 218 |
Release | 2010-09-01 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 0307763838 |
Among the "best American short stories of the past two decades" (The Atlantic Monthly) from one of our most acclaimed writers. In short stories "so vibrant and alive they have heartbeats, the prose so electric and dazzling it makes the pulse race" (Vanity Fair), 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. 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, offering a rich examination of our capacity for transformation and salvation.