Ninety-Nine Stories of God

by Joy Williams

Overview

A New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year at Esquire, Seattle Times, Minnesota Star Tribune, Huffington Post, and Publishers Weekly.

From “quite possibly America’s best living writer of short stories” (NPR), Ninety-Nine Stories of God finds Joy Williams reeling between the sublime and the surreal, knocking down the barriers between the workaday and the divine.

Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Joy Williams has a one-of-a-kind gift for capturing both the absurdity and the darkness of everyday life. In Ninety-Nine Stories of God, she takes on one of mankind’s most confounding preoccupations: the Supreme Being.

This series of short, fictional vignettes explores our day-to-day interactions with an ever-elusive and arbitrary God. It’s the Book of Common Prayer as seen through a looking glass—a powerfully vivid collection of seemingly random life moments. The figures that haunt these stories range from Kafka (talking to a fish) to the Aztecs, Tolstoy to Abraham and Sarah, O. J. Simpson to a pack of wolves. Most of Williams’s characters, however, are like the rest of us: anonymous strivers and bumblers who brush up against God in the least expected places or go searching for Him when He’s standing right there. The Lord shows up at a hot-dog-eating contest, a demolition derby, a formal gala, and a drugstore, where he’s in line to get a shingles vaccination. At turns comic and yearning, lyric and aphoristic, Ninety-Nine Stories of God serves as a pure distillation of one of our great artists.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941040362
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	07/12/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	220
Sales rank:	1,009,198
File size:	689 KB

About the Author

Joy Williams is the author of five novels, including The Quick and the Dead and most recently Harrow, five collections of stories, including Ninety-Nine Stories of God, 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 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, the Paris Review’s Hadada Award, and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, to which she was elected in 2008. She lives in Arizona and Wyoming.

Editorial Reviews

Wry and playful, except for when densely allusive and willfully obtuse, Ninety-Nine Stories of God is a treasure trove of bafflements and tiny masterpieces…All Williams's work is informed by a learned yet half-feral Christianity. While Marilynne Robinson seeks to recuperate the legacy of John Calvin and the liberal strain in Midwest Protestantism, Williams casts her lot with the desert mystics—as well as the actual desert. Sand and saguaro, coyote and stone, have as much or more claim on her empathy as any man or woman. Animals and ecosystems, after all, have not chosen despoilment and self-destruction, whereas man has chosen it for them as well as for himself. Williams is a vociferous and despairing pantheist, more Spinoza than St. Francis (though she does love dogs). Her apocalyptic worldview often translates on the page to comedy, albeit of a brutal and comfortless sort.

The New York Times Book Review - Justin Taylor

"Pious" is not the first word that Joy Williams's masterly short stories usually bring to mind. And despite the title, Ms. Williams is her usual funny, irreverent self in this collection of very brief sketches sometimes only loosely connected to the theme of the divine…Everywhere there is bemusement about the limitations of communicating with whatever out there might be greater than us…Ms. Williams's brain is always good company…

The New York Times - John Williams

★ 02/08/2016
In Williams’s hands (The Visiting Privilege), a “story of God” can apparently be almost anything. Her slender new collection includes in its 99 stories pithy flash-fiction pieces about mothers, wives, writers, and dogs, anecdotes from the lives of Tolstoy and Kafka, newspaper clipping–like meditations on O.J. Simpson and Ted Kaczynski, conversational asides (the story “Museum” consists entirely of the line “We were not interested the way we thought we would be interested”), and, finally, actual stories about God—a particularly put-upon, bewildered God who seems to have lost the thread of his creation somewhere along the line. Here, the Holy Ghost is just as likely to alight in a slaughterhouse as to visit a demolition derby or appear to William James or Simone Weil, both of whom have their own brush with transcendence. The best of Williams’s humor, and her wonderful feel for characters, is present in pieces such as “Elephants Never Forget God,” in which James Agee describes a movie he’d like to make, or “Giraffe,” in which an aging gardener suddenly feels the presence of the divine. Somewhere in the neighborhood of Jim Harrison’s Letters to Yesenin, these stories are 100% Williams: funny, unsettling, and mysterious, to be puzzled over and enjoyed across multiple readings. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"Sly and wonderful. . . . [Williams is] after some big truths in a few words, stories so short that some of them could fit on Twitter, except they're too smart and not mean enough. "

The Seattle Times

"These stories are as full of surprises as a Noah’s Ark filled with mystical beasts, three of each."

Edmund White

"Joy Williams is our contemporary O'Connor with a mix of Protestant sacraments . . . and a Zen Koan consciousness."

The Los Angeles Review of Books

"Baffling and illuminating, witty and disturbing, these 99 religious-flavored vignettes may not tell you why we are here or where we are going, but they do possess the power to entrance. The divine Joy Williams continues to work in mysterious ways."

The Minnesota Star Tribune

"[The stories in Ninety-Nine Stories of God] miniaturize the qualities found in Joy Williams’s celebrated short stories: concision, jumped connections, singular details, brutal humor. I say “celebrated” because Williams has been writing stories for forty years, and for forty years her literary peers—from Ann Beattie to Raymond Carver, from James Salter to Don DeLillo—have regarded her work with a kind of Masonic fellow-feeling. Yet she remains, in some ways, a difficult, and certainly an original, writer. She writes at a slight angle to the culture, literary and otherwise. Her fiction is easy to follow and hard to fathom; easy to enjoy and harder to absorb."

The New Yorker - James Wood

"Joy Williams’s Ninety-Nine Stories of God reads like a blog-era bible as conceived by Borges, Barthelme, and Mark Twain. No writer alive captures the voices in the post-millennial psychic wilderness like Joy Williams."

Jerry Stahl

"Joy Williams is one of America's greatest living writers."

VICE

"These modern fables and skewed vignettes make the implausible plausible. Compression, as done by Joy Williams, extends the reach of her stories."

Amy Hempel

"I would follow the trail of Joy Williams’s words—always beautiful, compelling, and so wise—anywhere they led."

author of CHOKE and FIGHT CLUB Chuck Palahniuk

"Weirdly soothing . . . The best approach is to read Ninety-Nine Stories of God all in one shot, and then dip in randomly thereafter, at your darkest and dimmest hour, finding solace."

The Ringer

"Much like the divine, Williams’ prose is simple and brutal, thoughtful and haunting. A spare but startling book."

STARRED REVIEW Booklist

"The word count of this slender, extraordinary collection belies the density and combustibility of its contents, their midnight hilarity and edgeless reach. Joy Williams is our feral philosopher."

Karen Russell

"Each story is beautifully strange and meditative in an unexpected but glorious way. . . . Inarguably inspired, Ninety-Nine Stories of God is a devotional for modern cynics and believers alike."

Lenny Letter

"Masterly . . . Ms. Williams is her usual funny, irreverent self."

The New York Times

"[Williams] is ... a master of momentum; the stories in Ninety-Nine Stories of God end and snap, end and snap, their wit yanking you up and dressing you down right when you get a rhythm going."

The Week

"Magnificent, imaginative, and moving. "

Read It Forward

"[Q]uietly splendid. . . . I believe in art, and Ninety-Nine Stories of God feels like prayer to me."

Boston Globe

"Each story, like living tissue, is a reliquary that makes something splendid of our most secret agonies and desires."

Darcey Steinke

"While Marilynn Robinson (stately, assured) is so often held up as the major Christian believer in American letters, I would argue that, along with Annie Dillard, Joy Williams is the true seeker. Her stories are probes sent out into the universe."

Oxford American

"Williams addicts will mainline [Ninety-Nine Stories of God]; newcomers should chase the high with last year’s The Visiting Privilege."

New York Magazine

"Wry and playful, except for when densely allusive and willfully obtuse, Ninety-Nine Stories of God is a treasure trove of bafflements and tiny masterpieces."

The New York Times Book Review

"Every Joy Williams publication is a cause for celebration, and Ninety-Nine Stories of God shows Williams in her usual biting, insightful, and darkly humorous form."

Electric Literature

"Each story in this collection shoots like a flare over the abyss of our existential dilemma, flashing the briefest light on the depths below and above."

Eugene Weekly

"Williams says more in a page-long scene than most can say in a chapter; it's fitting, then, that her very short collection manages to encompass such an eternal theme with wit and grace."

Huffington Post

"Ninety-Nine Stories of God is gorgeously written, sentence-to-sentence, and arrives in vignettes that are condensed but not constrained, tight but not dry."

The Millions

"Not many writers can launch a premise like “The Lord was in line at the pharmacy counter waiting to get His shingles shot” without falling into gimmickry, but Williams—long known as a master story writer—twists the scenario to an eerily moving effect. In manipulating our most deeply rooted expectations, shooting them through a prism of irony and wonder, she has created a cockeyed book of common prayer."

San Francisco Chronicle

09/01/2016
As Pulitzer finalist Williams observes, "Franz Kafka once called his writing a form of prayer," and these stories are indeed prayer-like in their sculpted simplicity—and proverb-like in their investigation of the world's mysterious ways. A humanist goes mad countering the idea of intelligent life elsewhere, a brilliant painter continues her work after a debilitating accident, a child and a lion discuss near-death experience, and a man denies his long sober mother a martini on her deathbed as "she'd regret it." From a reading of Dante's Inferno on Good Friday to Philip K. Dick's asking about a girl's golden fish necklace, belief figures as both backdrop and content here. But the Lord's intervention in our lives can be uneven. VERDICT Perfect little gems; it's rare when such short works (many the length of this review) can truly satisfy.

Library Journal

★ 2016-04-13
"Hell is unpleasant. Heaven is more pleasant." Williams, maker of superb short fictions, plumbs the distinction in this slender, evocative collection. Absent a direct statement otherwise, we should understand the deity here to be something along the lines of what old John Lennon said: "God is a concept by which we measure our pain." The God that lurks in Williams' brief, elegant stories is very often puzzled by creation, as when he tries to understand why humans should so have it in for wolves: "You really are so intelligent," he tells one pack, "and have such glorious eyes. Why do you think you're hounded so?" Ever gracious, the wolves thank God for including them in his plan, leaving him to ponder—well, never mind, since we don't want to step on the punch line. Suffice it to say that sometimes God shows up on time, sometimes not, sometimes not at all; sometimes he extends grace, and sometimes, as with a colony of bats he's been living with in a cave, he "had done nothing to save them." This isn't theology in the Joel Osteen vein, but it is deep and thought-through theology all the same, and even when God doesn't figure in the narrative by name, the divine presence is immanent. And sometimes, of course, God is there without announcing himself, taking the form of, say, that homeless fellow who mutteringly assures us, "You don't get older during the time spent in church." Seldom occupying more than a couple of pages, Williams' stories are headed by a number, one to 99, but carry an "undertitle" at the end that glosses the tale in question, sometimes quite offhandedly: in the case of that heaven and hell distinction, for example, it's "PRETTY MUCH THE SAME, THEN," while an argument about the impossibility of really knowing God is slugged, rather more mysteriously, "NAKED MIND." Admirers of Williams—and anyone who treasures a story well told should be one—will find much to like here.

Kirkus Reviews