If you've never read Joy Williams, you've never read anyone like Joy Williams
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.
How to tell the story of a 500-page collection of stories spanning
more than 40 years? Especially when I really want to just exclaim,
"Oh, Oh, OH!" in a state of steadily mounting rapture
*Observer*
The Visiting Privilege is an electric and dangerously human volume.
Not making sense, and making too much sense, is Williams's alarming
territory. You will probably do what I did afterwards, and order
her old novels from America ... Cheever would have liked her
Breaking and Entering in particular.
*The Spectator*
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
*New York Times Magazine*
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*
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
*NPR*
One of the most fearless, abyss-embracing literary projects our
literature has seen ... ruthless, hilarious work that holds our
human folly to the fire ... you can't much pin Joy Williams down
with any obvious dark masters. She is American and contemporary and
strange, comfortable in the skin of domestic realism, even if that
mode is a kind of misleading costume for a far more sinister
project not often seen in American, or any, short fiction
*New York Times Book Review*
Deep, dazzling, disconcerting
*Adam Foulds*
Dark, funny, spare and unsparing ... wonderful ... Williams is
fully alive to the tragicomedy of our transient lives.
*Sunday Express*
Joy Williams is a stone-cold 100% American original ... [TVP] is a
treasure trove of high-octane prose and surreal wit.
*Observer*
Revisiting the edgy, perceptive, provocative stories of Joy
Williams make The Visiting Privilege a celebration. From the
opening story, 'Taking Care', Williams confirms her ironic pathos
and consummate timing, and rarely falters.
*Irish Times*
Williams's short stories portray the edges of modern life in vivid,
staccato detail and make for compelling reading. The narrative
threads move forward in unpredictable, exciting and often
unsettling detail.
*Guardian, readers' BOTY 2016*
Perfectly crafted short stories.
*The Observer*
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