The Pelican Child: Stories
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The Pelican Child: Stories

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  • AuthorJoy Williams
  • PublisherVintage
  • Pages176
  • ISBN9781984898814

About this book

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.

Author: Joy Williams
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2026-10-20
Pages: 176
ISBN: 9781984898814

Praise for this book

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
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
[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
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

Quoted in excerpt, with attribution. Follow a source link for the full review.