
The Pelican Child : Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award - Joy Williams
Joy Williams
- Pages · 176 pages
- Publication Date · 04/12/2025
- Genre · Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
Nominated for the PEN/Jean Stein Book AwardLauded as the best story writer of our time, Joy Williams returns with a taut collection that responds to our modern dilemmas with her signature dry wit and deftness of touch. In sinister and shifting landscapes, 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. For readers of Lorrie Moore, Mary Gaitskill and George Saunders, these haunted stories examine the instincts separating us from the beastly and the divine.
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