Synopses & Reviews
From one of our most heralded writers--Joy Williams belongs, James Salter has written, "in the company of Céline, Flannery O'Connor, and Margaret Atwood"--her first novel in more than a decade: the life-and-death adventures of three misfit teenagers in the American desert.
Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned landscape eccentric with signs and portents--from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wildlife museum--accompanied by restless, confounded adults. A father lusts after his handsome gardener even as he's haunted (literally) by his dead wife; a heartbroken dog runs afoul of an angry neighbor; a young stroke victim drifts westward, his luck running from worse to awful; a sickly musician for whom Alice develops an attraction is drawn instead toward darker imaginings and solutions; and an aging big-game hunter finds spiritual renewal through his infatuation with an eight-year-old--the formidable Emily Bliss Pickless. With nature thoroughly routed and the ambiguities of existence on full display, life and death continue in directions both invisible and apparent. Gloriously funny and wonderfully serious, The Quick and the Dead limns the vagaries of love, the thirst for meaning, and the peculiar paths by which all creatures are led to their destiny.
A panorama of contemporary life and an endlessly surprising tour de force: penetrating and magical, ominous and comic, this is the most astonishing book yet in Joy Williams's illustrious career.
Synopsis
Over summer vacation, three girls explore a world seemingly empty of meaning yet filled with eccentricity and random events. A panorama of contemporary life, seen through the looking-glass of adolescence, "The Quick and the Dead" is at once mundane and magical, ominous and comic.
About the Author
Joy Williams is the author of the novels State of Grace, The Changeling, and Breaking and Entering, and of two collections of short stories, Taking Care and Escapes (as well as The Florida Keys: A History and Guide). Among her many awards and honors are the Rea Award for the short story and the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her widely anthologized work has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, Granta, and Grand Street. She lives in Arizona and Key West.