The Visiting Privilege: New And Collected Stories

Author: Joy Williams

Stock information

General Fields

  • : 33.00 NZD
  • : 9781781257463
  • : Profile Books Ltd
  • : Tuskar Rock
  • :
  • : 0.658
  • : October 2016
  • : 222mm X 144mm X 43mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : November 2016
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  • :
  • : books

Special Fields

  • :
  • :
  • : Joy Williams
  • :
  • : Hardback
  • : Main
  • :
  • : en
  • : 813.54
  • : 514
  • :
  • :
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Barcode 9781781257463
9781781257463

Local Description

Williams is a devastating observer of social vacuities, and yet manages to induce great sympathy for the ways in which her characters desperately attempt to shore up their dissolving realities. {THOMAS}
>> Williams’s essay on writing, ‘Uncanny the Singing that Comes from Certain Husks’, has the same merciless sympathy as her stories. 

Description

Joy Williams' peerless short stories are unlike anything else. Her uniquely devastating, emotionally acute, morbidly funny portrayals of modern life have been captivating readers and writers for three 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. Triangulate a patch of uncharted territory between Lydia Davis, Raymond Carver and Don DeLillo, and somewhere there you'll find Williams at work. Real but surreal, bleak but funny, domestic but dangerous, familiar but enigmatic, her stories fray away the fabric at the very edge of ordinary experience to reveal the buzzing, transient, empty loneliness 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 forty-six flawless stories collected in The Visiting Privilege represent the culmination of Williams' career and cement her place as the most singular artist of short fiction writing today.

Promotion info

If you've never read Joy Williams, you've never read anyone like Joy Williams

Author description

Joy Williams is 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 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 honours are the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming.