Joy Williams: Ninety-Nine Stories of God

Praise for Joy Williams:

“Joy Williams has been enlightening us for a very long time about the short story but now in her collected stories we see the breadth and power of her vision. This is an important moment for American writing.” — Thomas McGuane

“Joy Williams has produced a hard, sharp, comic novel about the off-kilter genius of adolescence–a work of maverick insight and rash and beautiful bursts of language.” – Don DeLillo on The Quick and the Dead

“Beautiful. . . . Unsettling. . . . [Contains] among the best American short stories of the past two decades.”  – The Atlantic Monthly

“A brilliant spawn of Raymond Carver and Flannery O’Connor, Joy Williams blends mordant wit, uncanny characters, and weirdly familiar landscapes and locales. . . . By turns these narratives soothe, then surprise, then shock with jolts of recognition, recoil, and naked redemption.”  – Elle

About Ninety-Nine Stories of God:

From “quite possibly America’s best living writer of short stories” (NPR), Ninety-Nine Stories of God finds Joy Williams reeling between the sublime and the surreal, knocking down the barriers between the workaday and the divine.

Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Joy Williams has a one-of-a-kind gift for capturing both the absurdity and the darkness of everyday life. In Ninety-Nine Stories of God, she takes on one of mankind’s most confounding preoccupations: the Supreme Being.

This series of short, fictional vignettes explores our day-to-day interactions with an ever-elusive and arbitrary God. It’s the Book of Common Prayer as seen through a looking glass―a powerfully vivid collection of seemingly random life moments. The figures that haunt these stories range from Kafka (talking to a fish) to the Aztecs, Tolstoy to Abraham and Sarah, O. J. Simpson to a pack of wolves. Most of Williams’s characters, however, are like the rest of us: anonymous strivers and bumblers who brush up against God in the least expected places or go searching for Him when He’s standing right there. The Lord shows up at a hot-dog-eating contest, a demolition derby, a formal gala, and a drugstore, where he’s in line to get a shingles vaccination. At turns comic and yearning, lyric and aphoristic, Ninety-Nine Stories of God serves as a pure distillation of one of our great artists.