Honored Guest
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
In short stories "so vibrant and alive they have heartbeats, the prose so electric and dazzling it makes the pulse race" (Vanity Fair), Joy Williams explores the various ways we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss, offering a rich examination of our capacity for transformation and salvation.
"Beautiful.... Unsettling.... [Contains] among the best American short stories." —The Atlantic Monthly
Her landscapes reach from Maine and Nantucket to the Southwest and into Mexico and Guatemala, while the events cover a range of human travail, from children confronting the death of a parent to parents instead burying their own young, and the various ways–comic, tragic, unnerving–we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss. And all of her characters are richly, idiosyncratically alive, in circumstances at once supremely peculiar and strangely like our own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"To live was like being an honored guest," muses a teenage girl whose mother is dying. While death, loss and the likelihood of losing touch with reality are the focus of these 12 short stories by Williams, the elusive possibility of hope and mental well-being waits in the shadows, maybe even just within reach. Williams's deliciously fallible characters are often unfazed by their erratic behavior and violent eruptions. At work one day, a widowed masseuse in "Hammer" snaps her prosperous client's wrist bone without provocation. In "Charity," Richard refuses to stop for a needy family despite Janice's pleas. When he gets out of the car for gas, "Janice moved across the seat quickly, grasped the wheel and drove off," returning to the family and perhaps losing Richard forever. Williams's grasp of the slippery line between life and death is strong: she jars the reader with news of a debilitating accident or a fatality without a breath of forewarning. Her characters speak like poets or philosophers ("Words at night were feral things"), and her prose is imaginative and dynamic (a woman obsessed with visiting a mental institution prowls the halls, pretending "she was a virus, wandering without aim through someone's body"). Though some of her more absurd tales may perplex, discriminating readers will be greatly satisfied with this rich, darkly humorous and provocative collection.
