I kept reading. I kept turning pages. My brain unraveled completely.

Not my cup of tea.I won't attempt to explain why this didn't work for me, because that would assume I could put my finger on the specific cause of my frustration and disappointment.Full disclosure:: I consume a rather healthy quantity of - and I'm familiar with many of the more popular works in - not only speculative fiction and dystopia, but also conventional literary fiction (e.g., the kind of stuff that wins Booker, Pulitzer, or National Book awards/prizes). Yet this pushed none of my buttons...

I have read my share of apocalyptic novels which I really enjoyed: The Road, The Bear, Station Eleven, A Children's Bible,Bewilderment, The Walking Dead, Vol. 1: Days Gone Bye. etc. which I mostly enjoyed. This one, however, just pissed me off. I never found a point to the story, didn't appreciate the writing, found the characters all thinner than a destroyed atmosphere...just did not appreciate much of anything. I get it, we have fucked the planet up and will pay a price. And people are basical...

It's been about 40 years since I read Ridley Walker, but I remember it as being the foremost dystopian novel of its time. And now, with so many projections of apocalypse in novelistic form, comes the next classic. When Russell Hoban wrote Walker, the computer age was in its infancy, the Internet and all its fallout were still the thing of science fiction, the lives we live now incomprehensible to us back in 1980, thus leading to deeper visions of apocalypse spearheaded by climate change, mega po...

I'm 99% positive I'm just too dumb to understand this book. It was like reading a psychedelic fever dream. Often confusing and extraordinarily weird but with enough brilliant moments to keep me reading.

To everyone saying they are too dumb for this book, not necessarily. Is Harrow a good Joy Williams introduction? No. It is a masterpiece however, as all her work arguably is. I have never casually recommended Joy Williams to anyone. She’s often challenging, and can SEEM nonsensical. To a Joy Williams beginner who I know nothing about their reading preferences or histories, I’d say to start with Breaking and Entering (perhaps my favorite novel ever) or The Quick and the Dead, or better yet The V...

I thought Williams's The Changeling was one of a kind, but Harrow is in a new category. It's a dark, lashing, bitterly funny text--a novel shaped more by scene and koan than narrative. How can a writer relay the story of a destroyed world, after all? I'm a deep fan of Williams's short stories. And I thought The Quick and the Dead was a mordant masterwork. But this book is kin to Kafka or Krasznahorkai and other unflinching observers of human rubble. Harsh. Startling. It will make you question ev...

This was my first experience reading Joy Williams, and I immediately connected with her unmatched, unapologetic, scathing wit. Her writing is smart, taut, philosophically fluent, and laser-focused on a world in environmental, political, and social chaos. The author slaps us down into a blistering post-apocalyptic setting, and intentionally immerses us in the kind of unfamiliar absurdity which causes nervous uncomfortable laughter. The atmospheric disarray is exceeded only by the increasingly jum...

This was gothic, witty, spooky, very confusing, very disorienting, very challenging, felt like I was in a haze, kind of have a headache now, please don't ask me what this book was about, I don't really know. Now it's time to Google "harrow joy williams ending what does it mean."

It's a privilege to sit and watch as a writer of genius completely loses her shit while simultaneously remaining 100% in control. A catastrophic privilege. If I felt out of my depth at times, that was surely part of the plan. The concept of purgatory may be comprehensible but the experience of it is not. Civilisation ditto.

Astonishing.

Except for Pynchon, I don’t think there’s a living American author I’d be more excited about dropping a new novel than Joy Williams, and Harrow, her first in twenty-one years, is certainly a Joy Williams novel: dead parents, precocious children, ephemeral feeling of unease, and of course her unequaled feral-desert-monk prose. Here she has pared all this down. Everything is loose and wispy, time is confused and unsure, just as it should be in a world that goes on after it has ended. Williams’ tou...

“She was losing nerve-cell population daily. Everyone was. The last physician she had gone to said it wasn’t an acute problem. We have more nerve cells than we ever employ. Massive loss is not unacceptable, he assured her. He compared it to the amount of ink that can fade from a written message without changing what it says. She had found this charming. But there comes a moment when the message changes or becomes unintelligible or both, doesn’t it doctor? she had said. And he had smiled and said...

Edit: I'm happy to announce that my review of Harrow will be published in Rain Taxi this spring. Writing about this book was a real challenge for me and I'm really pleased with where the exercise took me. Original review: Magnificent. So, so good.

A razor-sharp and nihilistic allegory of environmental collapse, with staggering moments of brilliance, but experimental fiction isn't going to convince anyone to decarbonize the atmosphere. In terms of subject matter and narrative conceit, this is close to Tenth of December-era George Saunders, with a hallucinatory and whacked-out science-fictional premise, but without the empathy or humanism. In terms of dialogue, this reminded me (not fondly) of late-period coasting Don DeLillo: portentous an...

They did not consider themselves 'terrorists,' reserving that word for the bankers and builders, the industrial engineers, purveyors of war and the market, it goes without saying, the exterminators and excavators, the breeders and consumers of every stripe, those locusts of clattering, clacking hunger.

This is an experimental novel, and the thing about experiments is that mostly they fail, those failures are the way we guide ourselves to success. I see what Williams was shooting for here, but this is a failure. Williams' has often focused on environmental collapse in her work, a topic that is now de rigueur. In Harrow it is the end of the world, adults are crazy (they know what is lost but seem unable to face the fact they squandered it) and turn instead to ridiculous belief systems and spend

Did I comprehend all of it? No way! I more or less understood part 1 and 2 but the last part confused me a bit. I had so much fun reading this though! Williams’s weirdness and sense of humour is absolutely brilliant!Thank you Profile Books for the ARC.

Quirky, off-kilter, irreverent, not quite shocking, perhaps intentionally vague. But enough about me.There is much to like in this latest novel by Joy Williams. It's dystopian, maybe. There are funny vignettes, but maybe it's the wordplay within that is what makes the humor.The novel opens, more or less, as a story about Khristen (her father was obsessed with boats, but her mother insisted, at the least, on the first letter "K"). Her mother, crazy like all Williams' mothers, believes Khristen ha...

perfect writer perfect book