JOY WILLIAMS is the author of four previous novels--including The Quick and the Dead, a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize--and four collections of stories, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that 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.
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“A magnificent and moving novel [that excavates] the middle
distance between silence and experience . . . Harrow is a piece of
writing in the vein of Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka, its humor
weaponized by rage.” —David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
“Death-haunted and perfectly indescribable fiction . . . To read
Williams is to look into the abyss . . . [She] remains our great
prophet of nothingness.” —Anthony Domestico, The Atlantic
“The ridiculous, pigheaded, bemused, endlessly distracted and
continuously self-sabotaging state of the future is the subject of
this wonderfully goading satire . . . A blackly comic portrait of
futility . . . This is sarcasm of a high, artistic order,
reminiscent of no one quite so much as William Gaddis.” —Sam Sacks,
The Wall Street Journal
“Elegantly deranged . . . A hypnotizing novel, funny in places and
chilling in others, filled with wacky and tragic characters, that
unspools the absurdity in just one of our many very possible bad
futures.” —Emily Temple, Literary Hub
“Williams’s tone achiev[es] a new, perfectly hostile register . . .
[Her] vision of an annihilated earth seems to have flown from the
brain of Francisco Goya . . . As the novel continues, it plumbs
ever-deeper zones of dystopian weirdness . . . She practices a kind
of hallucinogenic realism, which takes at face value the
psychological flights of characters deranged by loss . . . Williams
has long written to the side of conventional English, pursuing a
form that feels more commensurate with actual experience—with the
terror, comedy, and mystery of moving through the world.” —Katy
Waldman, The New Yorker
“Williams is a writer for our times: both visionary and caustic,
knowing yet also full of wonder. Harrow’s short, dense pages unfold
into a world of Kafkaesque distortion, its sharp wit and
cruelty pierced with dreamlike language and imagery, and moments of
almost unbearable poignancy. As the book draws to its dark
conclusion, a hint of something miraculous, borne out from its
opening chapter, flutters over the final paragraphs. In Williams’s
shattered world, destruction appears almost like the possibility of
renewal.” —Catherine Taylor, The Financial Times
“Harrow belongs at the front of the pack of recent climate fiction
. . . A crabby, craggy, comfortless, arid, erudite, obtuse, perfect
novel, a singular entry in a singular body of work by an artist of
uncompromised originality and vision . . . To read this novel is to
know and to be known (Galatians 4:9) by a profound and comfortless
alterity, to encounter the cosmic otherness at the very core of the
self. What else do you want me to tell you? As I’ve said, it’s also
funny. I really did laugh a lot. Five stars.” —Justin Taylor,
Bookforum
“Williams’s voice is unique and spectacular. She describes things
in ways you never knew you needed to hear.” —Erin Lyndal Martin,
BookBrowse
"Who better than Williams to capture pure-hearted but absurd
efforts to retrieve paradise lost?” —The Millions
“Balancing creeping despair with mordant humor and piquant
strangeness . . . Williams asks if hope and compassion, reason and
responsibility can survive once the wonders of wild and flourishing
nature have been utterly destroyed. Brilliantly and exquisitely
shrewd and unnerving.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
“An enigmatic, elegant meditation on the end of civilization—if end
it truly is . . . As the clock ticks away, Williams seeds her story
with allusions to Kafka, bits of Greek mythology, philosophical
notes on the nature of tragedy, and gemlike description, and all
along with subtly sardonic humor . . . A memorable return for
renowned storyteller Williams after a lengthy absence from long
form fiction.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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