Eccentric Author Writes Brilliant, Odd Short Stories
by mansii
Fair warning: Joy Williams is a quirky personality. Known for eccentricities such as wearing sunglasses at all hours of the day, both inside and out, for not using e-mail, and for driving across a huge chunk of the US just to pick up some giveaway pews and hull them back across the states in her creaky truck--it's no wonder her stories are deliciously odd too.
Her recently released collection: Ninety-Nine Stories of God is full of snippet-length accounts that hit you in the gut with their understated significance and piercing satire. You'll do a double take and then a triple, hanging on every word. Williams' previous works have been nominated for both the Pulitzer and the National Book award and have been appropriately called Kafkaesque. Those who like a good puzzle will meet their match, as well as those who like to be hit with the weight of a story without needing to understand why. The title proposes that the common theme of this collection is God, but it will be up to you to find him in many of these stories. Williams takes every opportunity to poke at what we think we know with her sense of the comedic element in this finite world.
I will leave you with this short story appropriate for the spooky end of October:
"A woman who adored her mother, and had mourned her death every day for years now, came across some postcards in a store that sold antiques and various other bric-a-brac. The postcards were of unexceptional scenes, but she was drawn to them and purchased several of wild beaches and forest roads. When she got home, she experienced an overwhelming need to send a card to her mother.
What she wrote was not important. It was the need that was important.
She put the card in an envelope and sent it to her mother's last earthly address, a modest farmhouse that had long since been sold and probably sold again.
Within a week she received a letter, the writing on the envelope unmistakably her mother's. Even the green ink her mother had favored was the same.
The woman never opened the letter, nor did she send any other postcards to that address.
The letter, in time, though only rumored to be, caused her children, though grown, much worry."
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