The Pelican Child - by Joy Williams (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD - FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD - LONGLISTED FOR THE STORY PRIZE - NAMED A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST - 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).

"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

"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.

Review Quotes

A Publishers Weekly Editors' Pick
One of Kirkus's Best Fiction Books of the Year
One of People's Best New Books
One of the Boston Globe's Best New Books for Fall and Best Books of the Year
One of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025

"Painterly and provocative, slipping beyond the frame of reality, as if Magritte or Dalí had propped their easels amid the Sonoran desert. . . . Williams's serious business is to plumb the volatile interior lives of her characters. . . . The prose is beautifully lean. . . . She flavors her pieces with piercing observations, a pinch of irony, and her signature moxie. She's still got it, still mulling the riddles we pose to each other, and to ourselves." --Hamilton Cain, Boston Globe

"Peculiar and tantalizingly ambiguous. . . . Williams's stories seem to have passed beyond the dramatic arcs and emotional payoffs customary to short fiction. They are beyond pretending that the world makes sense. They are even beyond caring about the familiar concerns of the living--yet they are about life, anyhow, as it persists in this beyondness." --Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"[A] knockout new collection. . . . Her best book since The Quick and the Dead." --Jake Cline, The Washington Post

"Haunting, inventive tales. . . . Rife with dry wit, dark humor and a touch of the sinister." --Louisa Ermelino, People

"Williams is one of our most accomplished adepts in the art of estrangement--in literally making the mundane strange. The short stories in her latest collection are spiny little nuggets of jamais vu. . . . In Williams's hands, reality is a changeling with an occasionally wicked sense of humor." --Colin Dwyer, NPR

"The singular, disconcerting uneasiness that is so characteristic of Joy Williams's fiction, yet so hard to pin down, is once again dazzlingly on display in her latest collection. . . . A detail from her prose can stop you in your tracks. . . . And sometimes you have to pause simply to ponder the insightful beauty of what is being observed." --Cory Oldweiler, Minnesota Star Tribune

"Grande dame of 'writers' writers, ' among the greatest living practitioners of the short story. . . . Williams is a witty writer, dry and precise in her language. . . . The stories in The Pelican Child have the clean, clear surfaces that have led some critics to identify Williams as a minimalist, but the density and explosive weirdness that make her something else. . . . Strange and striking and wonderful." --Mariah Kreutter, Kismet

"In a dozen intricate, unnerving, caustically funny, and haunting tales, [Williams's] lonely, displaced, and bewildered characters struggle with painful quandaries in a desiccated world. . . . These grim tales are so ravishingly well-made, so astutely imagined, they evoke as much awe as despair." --Donna Seaman, Booklist

"Welcome to the Cult of Joy and Williams's new collection, The Pelican Child. . . . These are some of the finest short stories in the last century of American literature, all heartbreaking and beautiful and elusive and true." --Mike Jeffrey, On the Seawall

"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, "Best New Books for Fall"

"Another intelligent and fascinating literary collection from this Pulitzer-nominated author. . . . The uncompromising and often surreal tales have been crafted with a distinctive style, offering a mix of fables and fantasy connected by themes including death, grief, cruelty and greed. Despite the bleak and pessimistic outlook in many of the tales, there is much symbolism at play." --Rhianon Holley, Buzz

"[Williams] is a writer of arrestingly beautiful sentences and imagery." --Alex Clark, Times Literary Supplement

"This is nothing short of revolutionary. . . . Williams writes in the unredemptive, existential mode, with a keen eye for the hilarious-cum-absurdist in the face of death or nothingness, as well as for sudden swerves, gear-shifts, jump-cuts and leaps that destabilise our expectations from the narrative. . . . Ineffable, indescribable, darkness, unknowing - it's easy to see how her work shares genes with Samuel Beckett's. She lifts the skin of reality to peer unflinchingly into something that lies beyond the territory of language and meaning, and uses a form made of language to bring us there." --Neel Mukherjee, The New Stateman

"My platonic ideal of a writer. . . . Williams blends the real and fantastical." --Chris Powers, The Observer

"Williams [is] one of the form's living masters. . . . A vast, ecologically motivated collection, Williams's newest effort is far reaching, and while these stories are full of everyday happenings, The Pelican Child always keeps one eye on what the future has in store." --Colm McKenna, The Irish Times

"Pithy, spiky and defiantly strange. . . . Williams hopes to reignite our sense of wonder in the world, so that we might be rallied to protect it. Here, at the height of her powers, she may just triumph." --Miriam Balanescu, Financial Times

"[Williams] extrapolates the effect of environmental devastation on not only humanity but also, and most fundamentally, society." --David Ulin, Alta

"Enigmatic, elegant stories by a writer at the pinnacle of her art. Williams has long worked magic with stories that, on the surface, seem quite quotidian, save that something unspoken--and occasionally sinister--lies beneath. . . . Superb, and yet more evidence that Williams should be next in line for the Nobel Prize in Literature." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"The protagonists of these gorgeous stories from Williams grapple with mortality and their hold on reality. . . . Throughout, Williams grabs the reader's attention with striking dialogue and arresting conceits. This collection is a gift from a master of the form." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

About the Author

JOY WILLIAMS is the author of five previous novels--including Harrow, a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein and the Los Angeles Times book prizes, and The Quick and the Dead, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize--as well as four collections of stories. Her book of essays, Ill Nature, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. 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 was elected to the Academy in 2008. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming.