“Behold the mystery, the mysterious, undeserved beauty of the world.’’

August 8, 2016 8:34 AM

The Misanthropic Genius of Joy Williams [The New York Times] The writer’s new story collection establishes her as one of the greatest chroniclers of humanity’s insignificance.

“To call her 50-year career that of a writer’s writer does not go far enough. Her three story collections and four darkly funny novels are mostly overlooked by readers but so beloved by generations of fiction masters that she might be the writer’s writer’s writer. ‘‘She did the important work of taking the tight, minimal Carveresque story and showing that you could retrofit it with comedy,’’ George Saunders told me, ‘‘that particularly American brand of funny that is made of pain.’’”

- 'Good Writing Never Soothes or Comforts': Joy Williams on Writing [The Atlantic]

“It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole, of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well. There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process. Writers are like eremites or anchorites—natural-born eremites or anchorites—who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or into the cave in the first place. Why am I so isolate in this strange place? Why is my sweat being sold as elixir? And how have I become so enmeshed with works, mere works, phantoms?”

- 'Writing Gives Me No Happiness': An Interview with Joy Williams [VICE]

VICE: Your work has a lot of stylistic variety, from the dense gothic prose of State of Grace to the more minimalist philosophical prose of Ninety-Nine Stories of God. Do you see your style as evolving, or does each work create its own style?
JOY WILLIAMS: Each work creates its own path to being told. I don't know how I was doing what I did in State of Grace , but having done it, I wouldn't know how to do it again. Paul Bowles told Jane that she should utilize "the hammer and nails" available to the fiction writer, the tricks and tools of narrative construction. But she had to make her own hammer and nails each time before should could begin.

- Joy Williams, The Art of Fiction No. 223 [The Paris Review]

INTERVIEWER: Can you define a story, if not its usefulness?
JOY WILLIAMS: What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensi- bility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes—which is Wallace Stevens, I think. As a form, the short story is hardly divine, though all excel- lent art has its mystery, its spiritual rhythm. I think one should be able to do a lot in less than twenty pages. I read a story recently about a woman who’d been on the lam and her husband dies and she ends up getting in her pickup and driving away at the end, and it was all about fracking, damage, dust to the communities, people selling out for fifty thousand dollars. It was so boring.

- 3 Stories of God: 79, 80, and 93 [The Paris Review] [Excerpt]

First published in The Paris Review in 1968, Joy Williams has since appeared in our pages many times. 99 Stories of God is her first book of fiction in nearly a decade and was written, she has said, partly in an attempt to imitate the inimitable Thomas Bernhard, that “cranky genius of Austrian literature,” and his The Voice Imitator: 104 Stories.

80

Over the years, our succession of beloved dogs were always losing their identification tags.

Since we traveled frequently and often chose areas to pass through where the dogs could run free and tussle, our dogs lost their identification tags in at least a dozen states. Frequently these tags, which included our home address as well as a telephone number, would be returned to us through the mail with a short note of greeting and good wishes.

With the exception of one finder who was not a realtor or an insurance agent, all the finders who contacted us were realtors or insurance agents who enclosed their business cards.

Opportunity

- 50 Reasons Why You Should Read Joy Williams [The Millions]

posted by Fizz (10 comments total)

A small note: the title article from the New York Times was written when her previous short story collection The Visiting Privilege was published. Her most recent collection is titled: Ninety-Nine Stories of God. I posted the title article because its a good starting point for anyone interested in reading more of her work.
posted by Fizz at 8:37 AM on August 8, 2016

The only work I've read of hers is The Quick and the Dead and I thought it was brilliant. Really unique, insightful voice and some of the blackest humor I've seen in fiction. I've been meaning to check out her other work ever since. Thanks for the reminder, Fizz!
posted by town of cats at 8:39 AM on August 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

I read her recent collection Ninety-Nine Stories of God in a single sitting. It was this giant gulp of wonderful. Each story (though I hesitate to call them that, they often feel more like poems or images) was short, sharp, and fast. I had to slow down my reading and go back and reread a few carefully, there was this urge to just plough through because of their brevity, but these are stories that should definitely be read again. I cannot wait to go back.
posted by Fizz at 8:51 AM on August 8, 2016

I love Joy Williams so much that I read her Key West travel guide! Off to read allll of these links. Thank you.
posted by gingerbeer at 10:27 AM on August 8, 2016

‘‘She did the important work of taking the tight, minimal Carveresque story and showing that you could retrofit it with comedy,’’ George Saunders told me, ‘‘that particularly American brand of funny that is made of pain.’’

I'm in! Thanks for this!
posted by kneecapped at 2:50 PM on August 8, 2016

I was eager to check these out but then the review of The Visiting Privilege makes a big production out of many of the stories featuring shitty things happening to animals, and Ninety-Nine Stories is giving me much the same impression. Is this accurate? Where do I go in Williams' oeuvre if I just want to read about shitty things happening to humans?
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:15 PM on August 8, 2016

I'm ashamed that I didn't know of her before, and am very much looking forward to diving in. Thanks for posting this.
posted by mudpuppie at 6:33 PM on August 8, 2016

Huh. Another reference to Aslan (the other upthread, re Turkish Delight).
posted by DavLaurel at 10:20 AM on August 9, 2016

This is timely, 'cause I just read her story that was in the New Yorker a few weeks ago, and it was a story the likes of which I had not seen and I wondered about her. Now I know more and now I find myself wanting to know even more.
posted by lauranesson at 2:15 PM on August 9, 2016

From the July 25, 2016 issue of the New Yorker: “Stuff” by Joy Williams
posted by Fizz at 1:31 PM on August 11, 2016