Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Pelican Child: Stories

The Pelican Child: Stories

Williams, Joy

Paperback

General FictionLiterary Fiction

Publisher Price: $18.00

PREORDER - Expected ship date October 20, 2026

ISBN10: 1984898817
ISBN13: 9781984898814
Publisher: Vintage
Published: Oct 20 2026
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.44
Height: 0.50 Width: 5.19 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD - FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD - 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 other--the coiled wit, the sense of a confused and ruined landscape, even the slight chortle of hope that lurks between the words--for the scrupulous effort of telling, in these eleven stories, has a ravishing beauty that belies their substance. We meet lost souls like 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, a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence; the ghost of George Gurdieff, on an obsessive visit to the Arizona birthplace of the shining Susan Sontag; the pelican child who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs.

All of these characters insist on exploring, often at their peril, an indifferent and caustic world: they struggle against our degradation of the climate, of each other, and of honest human experience (I try to relate only to what is immediately verifiable, says one narrator ruefully), possibly in vain. But each brief, haunted triumph of understanding is celebrated by Williams, a writer for our time and all time.

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