Ninety-Nine Stories of God - Hardcover

Williams, Joy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1941040357 ISBN 13: 9781941040355

Publisher: Tin House Books, 2016

Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year at Esquire, Seattle Times, Minnesota Star Tribune, Huffington Post, and Publishers Weekly.

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Joy Williams is the author of four novels, four previous story collections, and the book of essays Ill Nature. She’s been nominated for the National Book Award, The Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent title is The Visiting Privilege: New & Collected Stories. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming.

Review:

“Wry and playful, except for when densely allusive and willfully obtuse, Ninety-Nine Stories of God is a treasure trove of bafflements and tiny masterpieces.”
- The New York Times Book Review

“[The stories in Ninety-Nine Stories of God] miniaturize the qualities found in Joy Williams’s celebrated short stories: concision, jumped connections, singular details, brutal humor. I say “celebrated” because Williams has been writing stories for forty years, and for forty years her literary peers―from Ann Beattie to Raymond Carver, from James Salter to Don DeLillo―have regarded her work with a kind of Masonic fellow-feeling. Yet she remains, in some ways, a difficult, and certainly an original, writer. She writes at a slight angle to the culture, literary and otherwise. Her fiction is easy to follow and hard to fathom; easy to enjoy and harder to absorb.”
- James Wood, The New Yorker

“[Q]uietly splendid. . . . I believe in art, and Ninety-Nine Stories of God feels like prayer to me.”
- Boston Globe

“Not many writers can launch a premise like “The Lord was in line at the pharmacy counter waiting to get His shingles shot” without falling into gimmickry, but Williams―long known as a master story writer―twists the scenario to an eerily moving effect. In manipulating our most deeply rooted expectations, shooting them through a prism of irony and wonder, she has created a cockeyed book of common prayer.”
- San Francisco Chronicle

“Baffling and illuminating, witty and disturbing, these 99 religious-flavored vignettes may not tell you why we are here or where we are going, but they do possess the power to entrance. The divine Joy Williams continues to work in mysterious ways.”
- The Minnesota Star Tribune, Best Fiction of the Year

“Sly and wonderful. . . . [Williams is] after some big truths in a few words, stories so short that some of them could fit on Twitter, except they're too smart and not mean enough. ”
- The Seattle Times

“A collection of fiction for our fractured times from a modern master ― funny, profound and redemptive.”
- The Seattle Times, Best Books of 2016

“Williams says more in a page-long scene than most can say in a chapter; it's fitting, then, that her very short collection manages to encompass such an eternal theme with wit and grace.”
- Huffington Post

“[Williams] is ... a master of momentum; the stories in Ninety-Nine Stories of God end and snap, end and snap, their wit yanking you up and dressing you down right when you get a rhythm going.”
- The Week

“Read together, Joy Williams’ stories are a humanist manifesto, a celebration of our most mysterious values, desires and prejudices.”
- Huffington Post, Best Fiction of 2016

About this edition

• Publisher: Tin House Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1941040357
• ISBN 13: 9781941040355
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 220