by Joy Williams
For insurance purposes, Jones’s wife is brought out to the car in a wheelchair. She is thin and beautiful. Jones is grateful and confused. He has a mad wish to tip the orderly. Have so many years really passed? Is this not his wife, his love, fresh from giving birth? Isn’t everything about to begin? In Mexico, his daughter wanders disinterestedly through a jewelry shop where she picks up a small silver egg. It opens on a hinge and inside are two figures, a bride and groom. Jones puts the baby in his wife’s arms. At first the baby is alarmed because she cannot remember this person very well and she reaches for Jones, whimpering. But soon she is soothed by his wife’s soft voice and she falls asleep in her arms as they drive. Jones has readied everything carefully for his wife’s homecoming. The house is clean and orderly. For days he has restricted himself to only one part of the house so that his clutter will be minimal. Jones helps his wife up the steps to the door. Together they enter the shining rooms.
JOY WILLIAMS
Joy Williams is the author of four novels, three short story collections, and a history of the Florida Keys. She has received the Rea Award for the short story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her most recent novel, The Quick and the Dead, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Books by Joy Williams
Novels
State of Grace
The Changeling
Breaking and Entering
The Quick and the Dead
Short Stories
Taking Care
Escapes
Honored Guest
Nonfiction
The Florida Keys: A History and Guide
Ill Nature
BOOKS BY JOY WILLIAMS
THE QUICK AND THE DEAD
Misanthropic Alice is a budding eco-terrorist; Corvus has dedicated herself to mourning; Annabel is desperate to pursue an ordinary American life of indulgences. Misfit and motherless, they share an American desert summer of darkly illuminating signs and portents. In locales as mirrored strange as a nursing home where the living dead are preserved, to a wildlife museum where the dead are presented as living, the girls attend to their future. A remarkable attendant cast of characters, including a stroke survivor whose soulmate is a vivisected monkey, an aging big-game hunter who finds spiritual renewal in his infatuation with an eight-year-old—the formidable Emily Bliss Pickles—and a widower whose wife continues to harangue him, populate this gloriously funny and wonderfully serious novel where the dead are forever infusing the living, and all creatures strive to participate in eternity
Fiction/978-0-375-72764-1
STATE OF GRACE
Nominated for the National Book Award in 1974, this haunting, profoundly disquieting novel manages to be at once sparse and lush, to combine Biblical simplicity with Gothic intensity and strangeness. It is the story of Kate, despised by her mother, bound to her father by ties stronger and darker than blood. It is the story of her attempted escapes—in detached sexual encounters, at a Southern college populated by spoiled and perverse beauties, and in a doomed marriage to a man who cannot understand what she is running from. Witty, erotic, and searingly acute, State of Grace bears the inimitable stamp of one of our finest and most provocative writers.
Fiction/978-0-679-72619-7
ILL NATURE
Most of us watch with mild concern the fast-disappearing wild spaces or the recurrence of pollution-related crises such as oil spills, toxic blooms in fertilizer-enriched forests, and violence both home and abroad. Joy Williams does more than watch. In this collection of condemnations and love letters, revelations and cries for help, she brings to light the price of complacency with scathing wit and unexpected humor. Sounding the alarm over the disconnection from the natural world that our consumer culture has created, she takes on subjects as varied as the culling of elephants, electron-probed chimpanzees, vanishing wetlands, and the determination of American women to reproduce at any cost. Controversial, opinionated, at times exceptionally moving, Ill Nature is a clarion call for us to step out of our cars and cubicles, and do something to save our natural legacy.
Nature/Essays/978-0-375-71363-7
HONORED GUEST
With her singular brand of gorgeous dark humor, Joy Williams explores the various ways—comic, tragic, and unnerving—we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss. A masseuse breaks her rich client’s wrist bone, a friend visits at the hospital long after she is welcome, and a woman surrenders her husband to a creepily adoring student. From one of our most acclaimed writers, Honored Guest is a rich examination of our capacity for transformation and salvation.
Fiction/Short Stories/978-1-4000-9552-0
ALSO AVAILABLE
Taking Care, 978-0-394-72912-1
VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
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Copyright © 1972, 1973, 1974, 1976, 1977, 1980, 1981, 1982 by Joy Williams
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Originally published by Random House, Inc., in 1982.
“The Farm” was first published in Antaeus.
“Summer” was first published in The New Yorker.
“The Excursion” originally appeared in Partisan Review, Vol. 43, no. 2, 1976.
Other stories in this work, some in different form, have been previously published in Audience, the Carolina Quarterly, Esquire, Ms., Northern Ohio Live, the Paris Review, and Viva.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Williams, Joy.
Taking care.
(Vintage contemporaries)
I. Title.
[PS3573.14496T3 1985] 813’.54 85-40150
eISBN: 978-0-307-76384-6
v3.0