The Pelican Child: Stories - Hardcover

by Joy Williams (Author)

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD - FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD - LONGLISTED FOR THE STORY PRIZE - NAMED A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST - 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).

"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

"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 others--the coiled wit, the sense of a confused and ruined landscape, even the slight whisper of hope that lurks between the words--for the scrupulous effort of telling, in these stories, has a ravishing beauty that belies their subjects. We meet lost souls such as 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," we encounter a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence; and in the final story, we learn of the "pelican child" who lives with the "bony, ill-tempered" Baba Iaga "in a little hut on chicken legs."

All of these characters insist on exploring an indifferent and caustic world. They struggle against our degradation of the climate and of each other, possibly in vain. But each brief, haunted triumph of understanding is celebrated by Williams, a writer for our time and all time.

Author Biography

JOY WILLIAMS is the author of five previous novels--including Harrow, a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein and the Los Angeles Times book prizes, and The Quick and the Dead, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize--as well as four collections of stories. Her book of essays, Ill Nature, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among her many honors are the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was elected to the Academy in 2008. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming.