Joy Williams has quickly become one of my favorite writers and this has become one of my favorite collections of all time. It is pretty hard to explain the magic that is contained in each of these stories. Each story takes a million different turns and each outstanding/off-beat character moves the stories along with their own unique brand of humor, angst and language. Williams has what Carver had in his short stories, a surpise at every turn, the most frighteningly realistic dialogue, and the mo...

Joy Williams, better than anyone else, is capable of finely capturing the complex and arbitrary, if largely mundane, situations life works itself into. Her manner is precise and unforced, her ear highly refined. Not much needs to happen in most of these, Williams just circulates around a few characters, their surroundings, the people who may appear around them, and perfectly articulates through a thousand incidental and semi-random instants, the feelings of loss and limbo that lurk at the periph...

god, I fucking love her....breaking and entering is better but I mean it's a fucking masterpiece of a novel....as far as shorts: this is second only to carver and Chekhov and by second, I mean barely....she got style for miles and miles so much styyyyyle that it's wasted...

stories infused w subtly troubling ambiguitynot making false promises or pretending to have answersa writer who brings our animal side into the lightwithout any trace of judgment or self-righteousnessshowing the danger and beauty of the world intertwined similar in style to Raymond Carver or James Salterwith a muffled maniacal chuckle in the backgroundI will read Joy Williams again

Joy Williams beloved dog turned on her. She had to put him down. I used to have a doberman named Sanchez a la Mancha. My brother rescued him from a dire situation. Sanchez was understandably crazy. A lot of other people's pets have passed into my company over the years and that's what happened there. I had Sanchez from the age of fourteen until I was twenty-four. He always had separation anxiety. Over the years something inside his doggy skull turned that anxiety into an Ike Turner variety of lo...

In my quest to read one short story a day, I have finally pulled this book from the shelf where it's been patiently waiting for over 25 years. And, WOW! There are some amazing stories in this collection!Most of them deal with the seemingly mundane aspects of life - people raising children and trying to keep a marriage together. Others take a decidedly darker turn. All of them consist of beautiful words, strung together by an undeniably talented writer. Sam and Elizabeth met as people usually mee...

"Many things that human words have harmed are restored again by the silence of animals."

Perhaps an acquired taste, but once you bite into a few of these stories and taste their delicious sentences, a beautifully nourishing buffet of sentences, observations, and weirdness awaits you. Can't be recommended enough.

I like this book.This book is funny, detached, sarcastic, calm, and other things.

While I read Honored Guestn in a week, I took this collection in over the course of a year and a half. I wonder if I would have enjoyed it as much as the former if I had read it as quickly. It's still Joy Williams, the greatest living writer, so it's still essential; I'm grading on a curve here. The last/titular story has the only real hiint of grace I've found in her work and might be the best thing I've read from her yet.

Stunning. Simply stunning. Like small, clouded pearls dropped perfectly at the corner of my vision. These stories glitter in fragments, they whisper, hint, suggest, gesture towards...There is the touch of the Fable in them, and a touch of madness. Sometimes I found I was holding my breath, whether through tension or for fear of startling them silent, I don't know. The words in this book do what short stories are suppose to do. Each one is a finger held against a pressure point, a touch that echo...

Uh so no offense, but I'm pretty irritated with you guys. Why didn't you tell me about Joy Williams? You're supposed to be my FRIENDS.I don't know why I never heard of this lady before. Given all the millions of hours I've spent on this BOOK REPORT website, you'd think someone would've been nice enough to have clued me in. It seems like she's pretty famous, but I never came across her until I read "Train" a week or two ago in an anthology and was like, "Who is this Florida writer who is so hilar...

These are the best short stories I have read in a long while.If I were to make a short story mixed tape, "Breakfast" would be on it twice.

Taking Care is a short story collection of different sorts of love. The all-consuming love that you have no sense of self, the loss of love, the devotion, love towards the four-legged friends, just love.The Lover and The Excursion are different stories about love but alike in the complete absorption in love. The Excursion weaves Jenny’s life between that of a lover and a five year old child. Jenny is not like the other children. From the perspective of her teacher, she tells lies to give structu...

Joy Williams rocks. very funny stories about domestic detachment and middle class bourgeois good behaviour that, when combined with someone like Ann Beattie, forms the road map for a lot of ~cool~ current literary trends

In so many ways, Joy Williams is a peerless short story writer. There's just nobody doing it like she does it. Which is not a comment on quality so much as it is on ingenuity and style: you can recognize a Joy Williams story from the first graf, sometimes the first line. That being said, and having finished all three of her collections now, there are a few stories here and there that are more or less forgettable. But the majority stick with you long after having finished them. The best ones here...

A mordant, anthological look at contemporary, middle-class life. Can confirm that Williams' prose is incisive, a little too painstaking at times tbh, and she clearly has an aptitude for short stories; a real shame she's so underrated. My only grievance is that I didn't appreciate it to the fullest...I have to be in a certain mood for short stories. 😪I don't know how I came across Joy Williams, but I'm glad I did and am looking forward to diving into more of her work otherwise. Maybe even revisit...

Reading short stories (for me, anyway) is something I have to do when I'm in the mood, generally. Some favorite American short story writers have been Margaret Atwood (Canadian, but shut up), Deborah Eisenberg, Flannery O'Connor, and John Cheever (even though I still haven't finished his collection). I could easily count Joy Williams among them.This was my book club's selection this month; I was open to it, but then the library took its sweet-ass time getting it to me, and then it showed up last...

Joy Williams’ writing obliquely lights up circuits in my thought patterns that make me feel exposed to myself. Calmly. Darkly. With swift shifts of gravity and humor. There’s just a little, little flavor of a Michael Haneke movie. Sometimes. Without such heavy dread, perhaps.The Excursion was creepy and disorienting. The girl accessing the woman and/or the woman accessing the girl. Train was fun, vicious. Winter Chemistry! Elemental, disturbing. I mean, whatever, I loved them all! Next I’ll read...

Joy Williams is amazing. I can't wait to read her novel "The Quick and the Dead." The story "Breakfast" in this book is one of the best I've read. And she does spooky and ominous so well!