By one of the most celebrated American short-story writers. . . these forty-six stories are powerful, important, compassionate, and full of dark humor. This is a book that will be reread with admiration and love many times over.” —Nicole Jones, Vanity Fair New York The New York Times The San Francisco Chronicle The Visiting Privilege might [be] the best book of the year. Her sentences are as sharp and precise as scalpel incisions, and her ability to turn the real beautifully surreal is second to none. . . . If you have yet to read Williams’s work, there is no better place to start than this book, which collects stories from across her decades of groundbreaking work alongside several new stories.” —Lincoln Michael, Editor-in-Chief, Electric Literature The Visiting Privilege is also laced with Williams’s trademark cutting wit, which provides a small release, as of steam escaping through a pressure valve, while also pushing the stories' dark absurdity.” —Laura Van Den Berg, O Magazine The New York Times Book Review Vice The Buffalo News The Visiting Privilege— a mammoth, definitive collection of her stories—is to smack face-first into astonishment: best words, best order. But more: One is constantly aware of a taut sensibility infusing them. Dispassionate but not un compassionate, this steady, Flaubertian presence, both witness and engine, demonstrates (beyond ‘mere’ mastery of craft) one sublime measure of literary art. . . . Seamlessly linked, precise, forceful, they spear the reading ear, piercing to hard, weird truth. They propose by their very existence—as much as by the story-freight they deliver—that we readers follow their lead and drop all artifice.” —Joan Frank, The San Francisco Chronicle Vol. 1 Brooklyn “Hard and bleak and somehow still bitingly funny, a kind of nihilistic long-form standup-comedy routine. Except you should sit down for it, and probably keep implements of self-harm out of reach.” —Ben Marcus, The New Yorker step up, even those living amid disaster.” —Debra Gwartney, The Oregonian “The Visiting Privilege assembles stories from as long ago as 1966 and as recently as this summer…. This is a decades-long stack of stories about people whose balance may never again tippy-toe on the ocean floor…. When I was young I loved Joy Williams because I thought she was so hilarious. When I got older I loved her because she refused to look away.” —Choire Sicha, Slate The Visiting Privilege is a fifty-course, full-tilt tasting menu of misanthropy and guile [and] solidifies her position as a thorny American writer of the first rank. . . . This is a writer who sees deeply into the hearts of things [and her] stories transmit a deep feeling for life’s transience.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times “[This] publication is sure to be celebrated. . . . Her books have been finalists for major prizes, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, because she is a fiery writer with a sharp humor and a dark energy and her sentences are weird, funny, and full of emotion. . . . These stories have almost a biblical ambience [and] at times they seems to lift into the realm of tale or myth. . . . Williams writes about the enormous, inconvenient human capacity for love, the weighty responsibility of it, the loneliness of it.” —Deb Olin Unferth, Bookforum The Visiting Privilege is a perfect book. . . the rare collection that doesn’t have a single story, even a single paragraph, that’s less than brilliant, and it proves that Williams is quite possibly America’s best living writer of short stories. . . . Even in its darkest moments, [it] is filled with a kind of hope, even a perverse kind of joy.” —Michael Schaub, NPR Harper’s The Visiting Privilege cements Williams’s position not merely as one of the great writers of her generation, but as our pre-eminent bard of humanity’s insignificance.” —Dan Kois, The New York Times Magazine The Boston Globe The Washington Post Vanity Fair Elle Booklist Kirkus Reviews
…The Visiting Privilege …[is] one of the most fearless, abyss-embracing literary projects our literature has seen. The plots of these stories give only a small indication of the grim delight—the despair and elation and queasy comedy—that awaits…The stories span almost 50 years, and even the earliest of them shimmer with death and mystery and thwarted desire…If Williams is among the least sentimental writers on the planet, neither does she push her characters off cliffs just for kicks. Cruelty and gothic grotesqueries crowd these stories, but they are founded on a substantial emotional realism, and beneath it one senses a writer yearning for something just out of reach, looking to reveal what was once quaintly called the human condition…when Williams skewers the entire human project—the reckless gathering of material goods, the destruction of the planet, the telling of lies to protect oneself—I find myself helplessly laughing…Nervous laughter? Maybe. Or the sort of helpless laughter that erupts when a profound moral project is conducted with such blinding literary craft, when the dilemmas most difficult to accept are turned into dramatic action…Like it or not, something is hastening toward us…And the question of what to do in the meantime—how to feel and what to think before we die—has rarely been reckoned with as bravely as it is in these very fine stories.
The New York Times Book Review - Ben Marcus
[Williams's] men and women are afflicted in all the classic horrible ways…divorce, cancer, poverty, depression, car collisions, children who despise them…Others characters are tormented in fresh ways of the author's devising…despite and perhaps even because of all of this, they are unbelievably funny. The mental heat they give off places them at the far end of the Scoville scale. The Visiting Privilege is a 50-course, full-tilt tasting menu of misanthropy and guile…[and] solidifies her position as a thorny American writer of the first rank…Ms. Williams smuggles some of the poison wit of writers like Lorrie Moore and Lydia Davis into her stories, while also hitching them to the laconic, high-plains muscle of writers like Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison and Robert Stone…This is a writer who sees deeply into the hearts of things. All the world's woe pools below her sentences.
The New York Times - Dwight Garner
★ 2015-06-09
