One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned landscape eccentric with signs and portents--from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wildlife museum--accompanied by restless, confounded adults.

A father lusts after his handsome gardener even as he's haunted (literally) by his dead wife; a heartbroken dog runs afoul of an angry neighbor; a young stroke victim drifts westward, his luck running from worse to awful; a sickly musician for whom Alice develops an attraction is drawn instead toward darker imaginings and solutions; and an aging big-game hunter finds spiritual renewal through his infatuation with an eight-year-old--the formidable Emily Bliss Pickless.

With nature thoroughly routed and the ambiguities of existence on full display, life and death continue in directions both invisible and apparent. Gloriously funny and wonderfully serious, The Quick and the Dead limns the vagaries of love, the thirst for meaning, and the peculiar paths by which all creatures are led to their destiny.

A panorama of contemporary life and an endlessly surprising tour de force: penetrating and magical, ominous and comic, this is the most astonishing book yet in Joy Williams's illustrious career.

Joy Williams belongs, James Salter has written, in the company of Céline, Flannery O'Connor, and Margaret Atwood.

Forty years later, The Changeling is no less haunting and no less visionary than the day it was published, but it has only become clearer that Joy Williams is a virtuosic stylist and a singular thinker--a genius in every sense of the word.

When we first meet Pearl--young in years but advanced in her drinking--she's on the lam, sitting at a hotel bar in Florida, throwing back gin and tonics with her infant son cradled in the crook of her arm. But her escape is brief, and the relief she feels at having fled her abusive husband, and the Northeastern island his family calls home, doesn't last for long. Soon she's being shepherded back. The island, for Pearl, is a place of madness and pain, and her round-the-clock drinking spurs on the former even if it dulls the latter. And through this lens--Pearl's fragile consciousness--readers encounter the horror and triumph of both childhood and motherhood in a new light.

With language that flits between exuberance and elegy, the plainspoken and the poetic, Joy Williams has blended, as Rick Moody writes, the arresting improbabilities of magic realism, with the surrealism of the folkloric revival . . . and with the modernist foreboding of Under the Volcano, and created something entirely original and entirely consuming.

Virtually all American writers have their favorite Joy Williams stories, as do many readers of all ages, and each one of them is available here.

With unforgettable characters, places, and events--a young divorcee, a shared summer home, a troubled family, a wedding, the death of a pet--Williams takes her readers on journey after journey, as only she can.

She practices ... camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams's imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colorations in the ecology around her. --A.O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review

Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen's failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she ranges across the dead landscape and washes up at a resort on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call Big Girl.

In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature's beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, an army of the aged and ill, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth?

Rivetingly strange and beautiful, and delivered with Williams's searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is their intertwined tale of paradise lost and of their reasons--against all reasonableness--to try and recover something of it.

- explore the exquisite underwater world of North America's only living reef

- discover the beautiful bridges that span the Keys, the forts, and the distinctive conch architecture of Key West

- experience the eerie serenity of Florida Bay's backcountry and the unique ecology of the Keys

- visit the Key West cemetery and learn about the lives of some of the Keys' eccentrics--writers, madmen, and entrepreneurs with various delusions

- find the best (and avoid the worst) caf s, inns, and other establishments that the Keys have to offer

Here is the most thorough and candid guide to the Keys, one of the most surprising locales in America. With insight and style, Joy Williams shares with us all of the region's idiosyncrasies and delights.

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 Georges 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 Iaga 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.

Among the best American short stories of the past two decades (The Atlantic Monthly) from one of our most acclaimed writers.

In short stories so vibrant and alive they have heartbeats, the prose so electric and dazzling it makes the pulse race (Vanity Fair), a masseuse breaks her rich client's wrist bone, a friend visits at the hospital long after she is welcome, and a woman surrenders her husband to a creepily adoring student.

With her singular brand of gorgeous dark humor, Joy Williams explores the various ways--comic, tragic, and unnerving--we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss, offering a rich examination of our capacity for transformation and salvation.