The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories - Paperback

by Joy Williams (Author)

The definitive story collection "by one of the most celebrated American short-story writers.... Powerful, important, compassionate, and full of dark humor. This is a book that will be reread with admiration and love many times over" (Vanity Fair).

Joy Williams has been celebrated as a master of the short story for four decades, her renown passing as a given from one generation to the next even in the shifting landscape of contemporary writing. At long last the incredible scope of her singular achievement is put on display: thirty-three stories drawn from three much-lauded collections, and another thirteen appearing here for the first time in book form. Forty-six stories in all, far and away the most comprehensive volume in her long career, showcasing her crisp, elegant prose, her dark wit, and her uncanny ability to illuminate our world through characters and situations that feel at once peculiar and foreign and disturbingly familiar.

Author Biography

JOY WILLIAMS is the author of four novels--the most recent, The Quick and the Dead, was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001--and three other collections of stories, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among her many honors are the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was elected to the Academy in 2008. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming.