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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" (The Atlantic).
"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.
All 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.
"Enigmatic, elegant stories by a writer at the pinnacle of her art. Williams has long worked magic with stories that, on the surface, seem quite quotidian, save that something unspoken—and occasionally sinister—lies beneath...Superb, and yet more evidence that Williams should be next in line for the Nobel Prize in Literature." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"An American master is back with crystalline stories that map the personal and political minefields of her unmoored characters. Williams blends everyday dramas with surreal imagery, her voice and range inspiring awe." —Boston Globe
This information about The Pelican Child was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
If you liked The Pelican Child, try these:
by Trent Dalton
Published 2020
An utterly wonderful debut novel of love, crime, magic, fate and a boy's coming of age, set in 1980s Australia and infused with the originality, charm, pathos, and heart of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
by Joy Williams
Published 2018
From "quite possibly America's best living writer of short stories" (NPR), Ninety-Nine Stories of God finds Joy Williams reeling between the sublime and the surreal, knocking down the barriers between the workaday and the divine.
by Diane Setterfield
Published 2007
A love letter to reading, a book for the feral reader in all of us, a return to that rich vein of storytelling that our parents loved and that we loved as children. Diane Setterfield will keep you guessing, make you wonder, move you to tears and laughter and, in the end, deposit you breathless yet satisfied back upon the shore of your everyday life...
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