I'm not a particularly nice person, Dennis. I've had to admit that to myself, and I'll admit it to you as well. I might have been nice once but I get by the best I can now. I don't even know how you'd look at someone, at anything, with your whole heart. Why, you'd wear yourself out. You'd become nothing but a cinder. Life would become intolerable in no time. Now, it sounds as though you had a very fortunate childhood until you didn't. It's what I always think when I see cows grazing in the field...

the best expression of joy williams' unique genius that i can think of is this: if "congress," the second story in this collection, can be said to have any sort of center, it is a world-renowned taxidermy museum in an otherwise middle-of-nowhere town that the protagonists stumble onto in the middle of their road trip. before it's introduced, though, we see another, smaller museum, one containing "only a petrified wedding cake, a petrified cat, some rocks and old clothes." it is never mentioned a...

This collection started out interesting but lost me. It is an accomplishment, having characters say things which are completely unexpected, but this feat did not draw me in. After a time, it had the opposite effect. Williams is obviously a talented writer, yet these stories flew past without touching me. If only I were more clever . . .

Of Joy Williams' talent for story-crafting, I am in awe. I've often seen quotes taken from her works, and the beauty of those excerpts led me to Honored Guest, a collection of her short stories. Sure enough, the prose is breathtaking: direct, flowing, and observational. The bleak, depressing mood will haunt you for days. The first few stories even gave me the urge to write, which is rare. My major misgivings are that plot devices were repeated and several stories lacked resolution. The latter es...

"She had been having a rough time of it and thought about suicide sometimes, but suicide was so corny and you had to be careful in this milieu which was eleventh grade because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them left twenty-four suicide notes and had become just a joke. They had left the notes everywhere and they were full of misspellings and pretensions. Theirs had been a false show. Then this year a girl had taken an overdose of Tylenol which of course

"But your life’s center is on the periphery." In the grand scheme of things, little things sometimes fail to become an indispensable part of the complete picture and inadvertently choose a different path for themselves. They walk alone, live through the day and quietly go to sleep without holding any promise of opening their eyes the next day. For me, short stories are made out of such ephemeral yet strong happenings. I approach them with almost zero expectations and whatever I receive in exc

(3.5) Joy is not the first thing you think of when you read one of Joy Williams’s short stories, but it’s not quite the opposite. Neither joyful or morbid, the stories in this volume are mostly about circumstances in life; each wave of nausea coming in, the torrent of neurasthenia and a melancholic nuisance the mind provides; how our emotions provide comfort against our fears, but also have the tendency to implode on themselves when we need that barrier, that wall of safety at the most opportune...

This collection reaffirmed my opinion that Williams is at her best in the short form. And she really is extraordinary, with a sharp eye for the oddest details. Her characters are mostly lost or adrift, dying or barely living, socially inept, quirky and strange. The only story here that didn't work for me was 'Fortune,' which follows a group of privileged twenty-somethings living aimlessly in Guatemala who have recently been descended upon by their rich parents. The characters were all pretty fla...

I ought to have something pithy, perspicacious and erudite to say about these stories. I really ought. But I'm afraid I'm just sitting here with a stunned expression on my face. Stunned. Yeah. Just gonna sit here for a while.

Given how much I adored Ill Nature and how into short stories I am at the moment I’m surprised and disappointed that I didn’t like this more.

Women 👏🏼 own 👏🏼 the 👏🏼 short 👏🏼 story 👏🏼

Joy Williams is just genius. I want to plagiarize it all. The elliptical “plots”(or parody of plots), the savage humor, surreal dialogue, the palpable threat in nearly every line, absurd situations, her unsettling and painfully convincing vision of life, and her handling of death, anxiety, sickness, and ecology and our place in the natural world. If you are fan of Jane Bowles and the films of David Lynch you must read Williams.

such interesting prose and imaginative stories but the majority of them felt sort of pointless, like i was brought into this little world but couldn’t bring anything away from it; i found the titular story especially disappointing in this way.Congress was my absolute favorite of the lot and proof of what joy williams is capable of 🤧🤧 sad and off-kilter, and seemingly meandering until the end when everything is brought full circle. so well done.

Littered with dogs and perfumed with death, this is a collection of short stories like no other. Sometimes surreal, sometimes perplexing, never predictable. This is my first taste of Joy and I can't wait for more.

Wildly original and disturbing tales of social disconnection and psychic dislocation.

Joy Williams is one of those writers who teaches you how to read her as you read her. In other words, one of the great writers. And here we have one of the great writers writing about death. In other words, writing about life after death. In other words, about the lives of the living after the death of a loved-one or less-than-loved-one. In other words, everyone. All life is life after death. It's only a matter of proximity.

[2.5] Ironic, melancholic stories about disconnected people. I like Williams' crisp writing and sense of absurdity but the stories feel pointless. I skipped the last few.

I can tell these short stories are well-written - their opaque literariness is a dead giveaway. I found the first pair especially interesting. In the titular story, a dying single mother and her teenage daughter are unable to communicate meaningfully, while in "Congress," which was beautifully bizarre, a woman's most meaningful relationship ends up being with a lamp she becomes emotionally attached to. But as I moved through the collection, I was increasingly alienated. So much "wait, what?", su...

The title story, about a teenage girl whose mother is dying, is fantastic. The "five stages of grief" turn into five hundred, the abyss yawns and waits behind every aggressively empty line that the mom utters. The atmosphere crackles with danger.Four stars for that story alone.The rest of the stories: meh. The loopy, dangerously-giddy, we-are-alone-in-a-universe-of-entropy-and-minor-madness tone gets old as more and more quirky characters parade before us and have random, often violent stuff hap...

I wonder why I don't give this more stars. It's absolutely gorgeous writing, with a great sense of weirdness and detail and dialogue. Cameron Pierce lent me this specifically so I could read "Congress," the story about the deer-foot lamp -- and I loved it! I guess I hoped the rest of the book would be equally surreal and unhinged, but instead the rest of the stories have convinced me that the weirdness of "Congress" is more a depiction of the heroine's mental illness than a step into impossible