The Visiting Privilege

Starred review from July 1, 2015
Four dozen stories by one of the form's greatest practitioners. Like pitchers, some writers are openers, and some are closers. Few are as accomplished as Williams (Honored Guest, 2004, etc.) in condensing the whole of a large, often painful world into a few closing sentences: "She coughs, but it is not the cough of a sick person because Pammy is a healthy girl." "It was like he was asking me which flavor of ice cream I liked. I thought for a moment, then went to the dictionary he kept on a stand and looked the word up." "She looked at the lamp. The lamp looked back at her as though it had no idea who she was." Not that Williams can't open a story well (one lead: "My mother began going to gun classes in February. She quit the yoga"); it's just that her most arresting moments come well after we've stepped into the world she's created. That world has less dirt for its characters to get under their fingernails than, say, Raymond Carver's, but it has some of the same uneasiness: if people are doing OK one minute, they're going to stumble the next, and it's often the things unnoticed or unspoken that will trip them. In the title story, for instance, it's not just the protagonist's offhand comment that ends a long-crumbling friendship: "We're all alone in a meaningless world. That's it. OK?" Just because it's meaningless doesn't mean it shouldn't be feared, though; in another singular moment, a young girl is terrified that birds will fly out of the toilet. Why wouldn't they? And why don't all short stories feature Gregory of Nyssa and javelinas? Williams, to belabor the metaphor, isn't just a closer, but a utility player at the top of her game. If you want to see how the pros do it-or simply want to read some of the best stories being written today-you need look no further.

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Starred review from September 1, 2015
It's the odd details that get you in Williams' meticulously composed, acerbically dark short storiesdisquieting, axis-tipping, heat-stroke tales of mental breakdown, alienation, divorce, car accidents, environmental disaster, and death. In In the Park, one of 13 new stories in this mighty retrospective embracing four decades of daring literary excellence, precisely calibrated imagination, and uncompromising candor, a ranger too gloomy about our destruction of nature to lead hikes for children actually sweats blood. Sneaking a smoke in the parking lot, he watches a raven investigating the interior of an open convertible. The bird, with its aura of Poe, picks up a pen, then drops it in favor of an empty beer huggie, a choice rife with many-chambered irony, which is one of Williams' many fortes. Thirty-three stories from past collections, including the perfect Rot, are gathered herescorching works that have established Williams as a virtuoso with a subversive, sure-footed sense of humor and an unsparing perspective on the marauding strangeness of the human condition. Williams' brooding, wry, and unpredictable new tales, including the somberly gorgeous Revenant and the sardonic Cats and Dogs, feature dementia, funerals, a boy channeling his dead grandparents, outlaw self-destruction, imperiled animals, mothers of infamous murderers, and unsupportive support groups. Jolting, tonic and valiant in their embrace of the ludicrous and the tragic, Williams' masterful stories belong in every fiction collection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)