'The Visiting Privilege' by Joy Williams

I am moving through this retrospective collection of Williams’ tenderly misanthropic short stories. It seems impossible to read more than one at a sitting: too many perfect strikes on the same piece of cultural anatomy in quick succession start to hurt. Williams is a devastating observer of social vacuities, and yet manages to induce great sympathy for the ways in which her characters desperately attempt to shore up their dissolving realities.
>> Williams’s essay on writing, ‘Uncanny the Singing that Comes from Certain Husks’, has the same merciless sympathy as her stories. 

Feb '16