A collection of stories by Joy Williams: thirty-three stories drawn from three collections, and another thirteen appearing here for the first time in book form.
What I like about theoretical physics is what I like about the work of Joy Williams. I absorb the sentences, process the dynamics, follow the dialogue, and then, somewhere during the reading, I lose the edge of what I thought I understood.
The Visiting Privilege lets us be immersed in, rather than periodically exposed to, the profound, lonely defiance of conventional thought that has always shaped Williams’s art, in content and in execution. Perhaps it will finally bring her the kind of popularity her work deserves. And if it doesn’t? She will still be great, and her greatness will still not be for everyone.
Like it or not, something is hastening toward us too. 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.
