'How to tell the story of a 500-page collection of stories spanning more than forty years?
Especially when I really want to just exclaim Oh Oh OH! in a state of steadily mounting
rapture' Geoff Dyer ObserverWilliams' uniquely devastating portrayals of modern life have been
captivating readers and writers for decades. Here for the first time Williams' thirty-three
best stories are available in a single volume together with thirteen new stories that show a
writer continuing to mould the form into something strange and new.Bleak but funny real but
surreal domestic but dangerous familiar but enigmatic Joy Williams' stories fray away the
fabric at the edge of ordinary experience to reveal the loneliness at the heart of human
life.In 'The Lover' a girl suffers a spiritual and physical wasting away in 'The Visiting
Privilege' a visitor finds refuge in her friend's psychiatric ward in 'Charity' a woman
gives a poor family gas money and finds herself marooned in their peculiar world in 'Another
Season' an itinerant man cleanses an island of roadkill in 'Craving' an alcoholic couple head
towards a car crash.The Visiting Privilege represents the culmination of Williams' career and
cements her place as the most singular artist of short fiction writing today.
