And you are never lonely with him, are you my dear. And yet it is our duty to be lonely, don't you know? One must strive to be more and more perfectly lonely. The heart grows indifferent, but one must push upward continually, more and more alone, toward the surface, like a blind, wild seed."My favorite story in Joy Williams's short story collection Taking Care was 'Breakfast'. I didn't want it to end. (I love "Taking Care" so so so so much.) I didn't know that Breaking and Entering was Liberty,

this book is really awesome. it's like badlands told through the eyes of sissy spacek if she was more jaded and more like virginia woolf in florida in the 80s.

It's a book with a narcoleptic dog. Joy Williams always has to have a dog. It's a book where a man braids his teeth with pubic hair before going to the dentist. The weird part is that he is now running for governor.It's a book where you can learn that poinsettia sap can take the hair off your legs and that Death's just an old hairy-heeled fart.It's a book with this bit of dialogue:"Did I ever tell you what my mother keeps in her freezer? It's not her underwear. She keeps her underwear in the ref...

as good of a book as I can imagine. Perfect. Found it on my own so that bleeds into how much I fucking love it....happens a few times a year. Fuck! What a book, man....Joy is a new favorite. the disconnect between the world and the dialogue is uncanny and beautiful....the love and falling out.of it.

Filled with arbitrary details that may be no more arbitrary than the ones composing your own life. For some reason, despite nothing much happening at first, I can really get lost in the momentary details of Williams' bleakly sarcastic (yet somehow earnest and compelling) universe. The tone reminds me somewhat of Hob Broun's Inner Tube, but actually with much better structuring and progression as the second half picks up momentum. I liked Williams' more recent The Quick and the Dead a lot (not th...

The thing about people is they’re rarely as boring as they seem. Joy Williams knows this. In BREAKING AND ENTERING we spend time with a collection of Florida’s finest, which means weirdest, even if the setting is mostly in the gated oceanside empty estates of the vacationing rich. The story follows a young couple who fulfill the promise of the novel’s title, living in a succession of homes they occupy unbeknownst to the absent owners. There are other characters, each more eccentric than the next...

I loved Joy Williams' The Quick and the Dead for its exquisite prose, quirky characters, and fearless devotion to being unapologetically weird. All of those qualities are on display in Breaking and Entering, too, but it didn't quite hit the same for me. Mainly, I found that I cared less about the main characters and more about the supporting cast, and oftentimes my mind drifted away from the actual plot into daydreaming about what it might be like if someone else took over the narrative instead....

Welcome to the lunatic asylum. Epigraphs from Kafka and Breton indicates what kind of reality is being essayed in this book and it has nothing to do with K-mart. Two drifters float into the ghostly lives of various characters who speak like hypnotized psychoanalysis patients or piss covered prophets on their fortieth day of locust eating. Really terrifying and unsettling but somehow incredibly funny at the same time. Are there characters more bizarre and memorable then Poe (the 75 year old weigh...

Loved it - 1988 post hippy novel, although more Altamont in the second half to the first’s Woodstock - two young drifters break into houses in a rich area in Florida and occupy them. 'The houses on Crab Key were owned by people so wealthy that they were hardly ever there.' Liberty is accompanied in this by the gnomic Willy with his gnomic sayings ('The big show is in our heads'), and the novel swirls about detailing the bunch of eccentrics they meet, alcoholics or drug users, conversations overh...

At first it reminded me of that story by Raymond Carver where a married couple is supposed to house-sit for their neighbours who are away, but they end up trying on their clothes, eating their food and rummaging through their drawers, except Joy Williams is completely BONKERS!! Bizarre characters, surreal encounters, brilliant prose. Poe and the black man with the blind baby AKA Mr. Bobby look like they just escaped out of an episode of Twin Peaks and, just like Lynch, Breaking and Entering is n...

Why is my favorite novel by a living writer out of print? Am I hopelessly out of touch? Two young married drifters break into vacation homes in Florida. Ferocious and perfect. Find it.

I liked this a good deal more than I thought I would and I knew I would love it. Early on i got the sense this story would not end neatly. I wish it kept going. I liked being in a world of strange mouthpieces for soliloquies. Entertaining story-telling takes a few strAnge turns and arrives at a moonlit desert in your mind. Or, it did for me.

SYNOPSIS: young married ne'er do wells do their passive best to fight the anomie of existence by breaking into mcmansions and experiencing their usual buried resentments and lack of affect in new environments rather than their own ill-tended home.Joy Williams is often an artist with the prose. her brilliance shines when she is exercising her descriptive muscles: she knows how to paint a landscape, to construct a house, to take a snapshot of a particular locale. although she is capable of the occ...

I loved this richly pessimistic story, intensely alive with deadness, of a young couple, drifters, who break into and live in rich people’s vacant houses along the Florida coast. As an adoring reader of Williams, and it being my first novel by her, I was glad that its sentences were as brilliant as the sentences her excellent short stories are loaded with.There’s an almost complete absence of emotion in the characters. They all talk away and philosophize and make grand statements. Except for Lib...

Williams writes in placidly beguiling sentences that measuredly trace their passing like fingertips across your chest and stomach until, with the suddenness of an onrushing doom, they form of such stunning imagery and stark poignancy that those digits clench into a fist that hammers straight on down into your heart.Man, Breaking and Entering has soaked itself into my bones. Not the Old Testament sin and stain, concussive secrets, and sour mash sunshine that enkindled and enraptured me so in Stat...

Pure Joy Williams. The book starts out with an amazing premise--Liberty and Willie, wife and husband, are living life in other people's homes. Not burglarizing them, simply living in them for a time while their owners are away. The descriptions are mindblowing. Williams is a master of defamiliarization and her matter-of-fact style smolders, searing images into your brain. And the characters! A parade of lonely, fearful, ecstatic freaks. A security guard. An alcoholic. A boy whose mother enrolls

I just recently discovered Joy Williams. I started with her short story collections, and fell in absolute awe. No one can write like this lady. No one. She writes characters like nobodies business. This story follows a couple who literally grew up together, and how they are now falling apart...or are they? Along the way( of their breaking into people's homes to just "live" and chill) they meet an assortment of motley people. Such interesting and memorable characters.I have now bought every Willi...

I should have known, of course. Who’s her biggest influence? Don DeLillo. What irks me most here? Epigrammatic, deadpan dialogue, presented as if all pointing at greater truths beyond the described, but to me so many dead-ends. Cryptic pop culture riffing apropos of nothing, or nothing that I could discern, anyhow:“My nephew, Donald Jean Turnupseed, killed Jimmy Dean. You know, Jimmy Dean’s car ran into his car.”“Well,” Willie said, “1955.”“It seems like a long time ago, but I don’t see what dif...

insane, incredible

A literary overview of the kind of drifting lifestyle led by people who are dead inside (or possibly actually dead). Williams' usual breathtaking prose and nebulous "plot" allow readers to break and enter into a lyrical, tropical world full of bizarre characters with real world problems and unusual philosophies. If you pick up this book expecting genre crime fiction, you will be disappointed. If you're looking for poetry and provocation, you may be pleased.