The Visiting Privilege

Zusatztext 48810427 Informationen zum Autor Joy Williams Klappentext The legendary writer's first collection in more than ten years-and, finally, the definitive one. A literary event of the highest order. Joy Williams has been celebrated as a master of the short story for four decades, her renown passing as a given from one generation to the next even in the shifting landscape of contemporary writing. And at long last the incredible scope of her singular achievement is put on display: thirty-three stories drawn from three much-lauded collections, and another thirteen appearing here for the first time in book form. Forty-six stories in all, far and away the most comprehensive volume in her long career, showcasing her crisp, elegant prose, her dark wit, and her uncanny ability to illuminate our world through characters and situations that feel at once peculiar and foreign and disturbingly familiar. 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. Zusammenfassung The definitive story collection by one of the most celebrated American short-story writers. Powerful, important, compassionate, and full of dark humor. This is a book that will be reread with admiration and love many times over ( Vanity Fair ). Joy Williams has been celebrated as a master of the short story for four decades, her renown passing as a given from one generation to the next even in the shifting landscape of contemporary writing. At long last the incredible scope of her singular achievement is put on display: thirty-three stories drawn from three much-lauded collections, and another thirteen appearing here for the first time in book form. Forty-six stories in all, far and away the most comprehensive volume in her long career, showcasing her crisp, elegant prose, her dark wit, and her uncanny ability to illuminate our world through characters and situations that feel at once peculiar and foreign and disturbingly familiar. 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....

ldquo;By one of the most celebrated American short-story writers. . . these forty-six stories are powerful, important, compassionate, and full of dark humor. This is a book that will be reread with admiration and love many times over.” —Nicole Jones, *Vanity Fair

• “This volume traces Joy Williams’s journey to sui generis master. Her nearest cousin among American writers is Don DeLillo, but only because, as with him, nobody writes sentences like she does. . . . Though she treats common states—parenthood, pet ownership, alcoholism—Williams eschews the realist story writer’s bromide that in the ordinary we find the extraordinary, because there’s nothing ordinary about her work.” —Christian Lorentzen, *New York
• “A fifty-course, full-tilt tasting menu of misanthropy and guile. This career-spanning collection solidifies Ms. Williams’s position as a thorny American writer of this first rank. Dire circumstances blend with offbeat wit in Ms. Williams’s work. The mental heat they give off places them at the far end of the Scoville scale, yet they are plump with soul and real feeling.” —Dwight Garner, “The Top Books of 2015,” *The New York Times
• “Such brilliant and depressing fiction that after I read it I was nervous to ever try writing again. . . .  Hope is very damaged in these pages, but you will find yourself laughing out loud as you muffle a gasp of crippled optimism. I am a real Johnny-come-lately to Joy Williams, but since finishing this new collection I have run out and bought every book she ever wrote. You should, too.” —John Waters, *The San Francisco Chronicle
• “Joy Williams has long been one of America’s greatest living writers, and The Visiting Privilege might [be] the best book of the year. Her sentences are as sharp and precise as scalpel incisions, and her ability to turn the real beautifully surreal is second to none. . . . If you have yet to read Williams’s work, there is no better place to start than this book, which collects stories from across her decades of groundbreaking work alongside several new stories.” —Lincoln Michael, Editor-in-Chief, Electric Literature

“[This] is powerfully united by Joy Williams’s profound gift for illuminating, with compassion and mordant humor, characters on the jagged edge of grief and spiritual ruin. . . . The search for mercy is at odds with a landscape that is increasingly merciless—and yet hope remains [and]the stories are rich with tenderness. . . . The Visiting Privilege is also laced with Williams’s trademark cutting wit, which provides a small release, as of steam escaping through a pressure valve, while also pushing the stories' dark absurdity.” —Laura Van Den Berg, *O Magazine

• “Immaculate artistry [and] one of the most fearless, abyss-embracing literary projects our literature has seen [with] the sort of helpless laughter that erupts when a profound moral project is conducted with such blinding literary craft. . . . If Williams keeps writing fiction—ruthless, hilarious work that holds our human folly to the fire—the novel and the short story won't perish anytime soon.” —Ben Marcus, *The New York Times Book Review
• “One of the most important and radical books published this fall. And Joy Williams has been doing it for decades. . . She will [now] be read more than any point in her career. This is a great thing, because looking around, we need Joy Williams more than ever.” —Shane Jones, *Vice
• “Unquestionably, the short story collection of this year. . . . Williams has been one of the great living individualists and masters of the short story [and] lionized in America’s innermost literary circles. . . . He work can be stark, brutal, creepy, tragic and hilarious, [and] all forty-six stories here are magnificently written.” —Jeff Simon, *The Buffalo News
• “Williams is brilliant in her commentary. . . . To enter *The Visiting Privilege—*a mammoth, definitive collection of her stories—is to smack face-first into astonishment: best words, best order. But more: One is constantly aware of a taut sensibility infusing them. Dispassionate but not *un*compassionate, this steady, Flaubertian presence, both witness and engine, demonstrates (beyond ‘mere’ mastery of craft) one sublime measure of literary art. . . . Seamlessly linked, precise, forceful, they spear the reading ear, piercing to hard, weird truth.  They propose by their very existence—as much as by the story-freight they deliver—that we readers follow their lead and drop all artifice.” —Joan Frank, *The San Francisco Chronicle
• “The year of Joy Williams. . . [She] writes some of the most memorably unclassifiable fiction out there [and] can move from precise realism to disquieting surrealism in a moment’s notice; she’s an incomparable figure in American literature right now.” —*Vol. 1 Brooklyn

*“Hard and bleak and somehow still bitingly funny, a kind of nihilistic long-form standup-comedy routine.  Except you should sit down for it, and probably keep implements of self-harm out of reach.” —Ben Marcus, *The New Yorker

• “This is a writer who gets under your skin [with] the unadorned truth. . . . She’s absorbed the American experience and has expressed its sorrows and defeats, as well as its tenacity, with and directness all her own. Especially when it comes to short form fiction. Many of her stories have achieved iconic status over the years. . . . …