Honored Guest Paperback by Joy Williams

Product Details

• Publisher: Vintage (2005-11-08)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 224 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781400095520
• Item Weight: 192.78 grams
• Dimensions: 20.32 x 13.21 x 1.52 cm

In short stories "so vibrant and alive they have heartbeats, the prose so electric and dazzling it makes the pulse race" (Vanity Fair), Joy Williams explores the various ways we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss, offering a rich examination of our capacity for transformation and salvation.

"Beautiful.... Unsettling.... [Contains] among the best American short stories." —The Atlantic Monthly

Her landscapes reach from Maine and Nantucket to the Southwest and into Mexico and Guatemala, while the events cover a range of human travail, from children confronting the death of a parent to parents instead burying their own young, and the various ways–comic, tragic, unnerving–we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss. And all of her characters are richly, idiosyncratically alive, in circumstances at once supremely peculiar and strangely like our own.

About the Author

Joy Williams is the author of four novels–the most recent, The Quick and the Dead, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001–and three other collections of stories, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Among her many honors are the Rea Award for the short story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Key West, Florida, and Tucson, Arizona.