Pelican Child

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. In these eleven stories, we meet souls lost and found: from the twin heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune, who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family's deeds, to a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence, to 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, possibly in vain. But each brief, haunted triumph of understanding is celebrated by Williams, a writer for our time and all time.