Concerning the Future of Souls
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jul 2, 2024
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- $11.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Quite possibly America's best living writer of short stories.”—NPR
“Williams is a writer for our times: both visionary and caustic, knowing yet also full of wonder.”—Catherine Taylor, The Financial Times
Returning to her legendary short stories, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Joy Williams offers a much-anticipated follow-up to Ninety-Nine Stories of God, which The New York Times Book Review called a “treasure trove of bafflements and tiny masterpieces.” Concerning the Future of Souls balances the extraordinary and the humble, the bizarre and the beatific, as Azrael—transporter of souls and the most troubled and thoughtful of the angels—confronts the holy impossibility of his task, his uneasy relationship with Death, and his friendship with the Devil.
Over the course of these ninety-nine illuminations, a collection of connected and disparate beings—ranging from ordinary folk to grand, known figures, such as Jung, Nietzsche, Pythagoras, Bach, and Rilke; to mountains, oceans, dogs, birds, whales, horses, butterflies, a sixty-year-old tortoise, and a chimp named Washoe—experience the varying fate of the soul as each encounters the darkness of transcendence in this era of extinction. A brilliant crash course in philosophy, religion, literature, and culture, Concerning the Future of Souls is an absolution and an indictment, sorrowful and ecstatic. Williams will leave you wonderstruck, pondering the morality of being mortal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Williams follows up Ninety-Nine Stories of God with another resonant collection of 99 vignettes, this time centered on themes of environmental destruction and mortality. The entries—none longer than two pages and some as short as a single word—showcase Williams's sly wit. In one, a woman's entire life is traced through the trees she's planted (an oak is "sheared and lopped to an unsurvivable degree" due to an "increase in broadband demand"). In another, a woman recalls how her husband proposed to her in skywriting, and how "the beginning was disappearing even before the end appeared." Elsewhere, Williams delves into the strange death of monk Thomas Merton, who was found with a short-circuited fan lying on his body; and zooms in on Vladimir Nabokov on his deathbed, distraught that he's no longer capable of stalking and extinguishing butterflies. Another entry depicts the day in 2021 when 1,400 dolphins were killed in the Faroe Islands. Interspersed throughout are brief episodes portraying the discomfort and fretfulness of Azrael, the angel of death, who is worried that "the mountains have been stripped of their holiness, the oceans of their mysteries." As with the previous volume, these pieces riddle the reader's mind with their exquisite enigmas. Williams continues to astonish.
