The Pelican Child: Stories

A razor-sharp new collection of stories of visionary childhood misfits and struggling adult dreamers from this legendary writer of “perfectly indescribable fiction . . . To read Williams is to look into the abyss” (The Atlantic).

“Night was best, for, as everyone knows but does not tell, the sobbing of the earth is most audible at night.” “Men are but unconscious machines and they perform their cruelties so effortlessly.” “Caring was a power she’d once possessed but had given up freely.” The sentences of Joy Williams are like no others—the coiled wit, the sense of a confused and ruined landscape, even the slight whisper of hope that lurks between the words—for the scrupulous effort of telling, in these stories, has a ravishing beauty that belies their subjects. We meet lost souls such as the twin sister heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune in “After the Haiku Period,” who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family’s deeds; in “Nettle,” we encounter a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence; and in the final story, we learn of the “pelican child” who lives with the “bony, ill-tempered” Baba Iaga “in a little hut on chicken legs.”

All of these characters insist on exploring an indifferent and caustic world. They struggle against our degradation of the climate and of each other, possibly in vain. But each brief, haunted triumph of understanding is celebrated by Williams, a writer for our time and all time.

“An American master is back with crystalline stories that map the personal and political minefields of her unmoored characters. Williams blends everyday dramas with surreal imagery, her voice and range inspiring awe.” —Boston Globe