Ninety-Nine Stories of God

by Joy Williams

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Pub Date Jul 12 2016 | Archive Date Jun 30 2016

Tin House Books

General Fiction (Adult) | Literary Fiction

Description

Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Joy Williams has a one-of-a-kind gift for capturing both the absurdity and the darkness of everyday life. In Ninety-Nine Stories of God, she takes on one of mankind’s most confounding preoccupations: the Supreme Being. This series of short, fictional vignettes explores our day-to-day interactions with an ever-elusive and arbitrary God. It’s the Book of Common Prayer as seen through a looking glass—a powerfully vivid collection of seemingly random life moments. The figures that haunt these stories range from Kafka (talking to a fish) to the Aztecs, Tolstoy to Abraham and Sarah, O. J. Simpson to a pack of wolves. Most of Williams’s characters, however, are like the rest of us: anonymous strivers and bumblers who brush up against God in the least expected places or go searching for Him when He’s standing right there. The Lord shows up at a hot-dog-eating contest, a demolition derby, a formal gala, and a drugstore, where he’s in line to get a shingles vaccination. At turns comic and yearning, lyric and aphoristic, Ninety-Nine Stories of God serves as a pure distillation of one of our great artists.

A Note From the Publisher

LibraryReads nominations due by 5/20.

Advance Praise

"these stories are 100% Williams: funny, unsettling, and mysterious, to be puzzled over and enjoyed across multiple readings." - Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Fans of Williams will not be disappointed in this latest offering. The stories, rather than devotional, or a sweet reminiscence of divine intervention, are a series of vignettes that throw into sharp relief the rippling something in the back of humanity’s daily lives....Each story is brief, with some less than a paragraph. Some amaze, some are quietly powerful, some gracefully absurd. Much like the divine, Williams’ prose is simple and brutal, thoughtful and haunting. A spare but startling book." - Booklist, Starred Review

“These modern fables and skewed vignettes make the implausible plausible. Compression, as done by Joy Williams, extends the reach of her stories.” - Amy Hempel, author of AT THE GATES OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM

"these stories are 100% Williams: funny, unsettling, and mysterious, to be puzzled over and enjoyed across multiple readings." - Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Fans of Williams will not be...

Available Editions

EDITION	Other Format
ISBN	9781941040355
PRICE	$19.95 (USD)

Additional Information

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Featured Reviews

Ellen A, Educator

I thought that Joy Williams' collection of short stories, Ninety-Nine Stories of God, might be a sort of collection of fictional devotions. And I suppose they might be, if one expanded the definition of "devotion" beyond recognition!

The stories are very short, somewhat like those of Lydia Davis; most of them are one or two pages and but many are even shorter-a paragraph or a few lines.

But how wonderful they are! God figures in them but often obliquely. Sometimes He seems to be irrelevant to the lives of the people in the story, other times he appears more baffled than the other characters at what happens. There are some true "stories" mixed in among the more purely fictional ones, stories that are quotes from William James or Simone Weil. O.J. Simpson makes an appearance as well.

The range of the stories is wide. They are often dark but funny as well. In fact, I found many of them, despite the bleak portrayal of human life, hilarious.

I am grateful to Tin House Books and NetGalley for giving me an advance copy of this very exciting collection. I can't wait to read them again!