A story about a young couple who are drifting apart. They break into Florida vacation homes while the owners are away, stay awhile and then move on. Liberty senses that Willie is drifting away from her and that their search, so relentless and mysterious, is becoming increasingly dangerous.

Breaking and Entering

Literature & Fiction

Williams, Joy.

Contemporary

Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group)

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.

Ill Nature

Essays & Correspondence

Vintage

A Pulitzer Prize Finalist 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.

The Quick and the Dead

United States

The Florida Keys: A History &amp; Guide is a smart, stylish handbook to one of the most unique locales in America. The Florida Keys--an unlikely sprinkling of coral and limestone islands that curve southwest from the tip of Florida--have always been engagingly different. Here, author Joy Williams, whose novels and short stories have won wide literary acclaim, shares with us all of the region's idiosyncrasies and delights. From the diving and fishing meccas of Key Largo and Marathon to the funkiness and sophistication of Key West to the remote outpost of Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, The Florida Keys serves the traveler as a witty and informative companion. Sensitive to and knowledgeable about the natural beauties of the Keys, Williams covers the exquisite underwater world of North America's only living reef and the eerie and delicate serenity of the "backcountry" of Florida Bay. The Florida Keys also provides fresh, up-to-date advice on the practicalities of where to stay, eat, and wander. Here is the quirkiest, most candid, and most literate guide to the Keys.

The Florida Keys: A History & Guide, Ninth Edition

Travel

Random House]

State of grace

Action & Adventure

NY: PARIS REVIEW EDITIONS. 1973

This 30th Anniversary Edition of THE CHANGELING by Joy Williams includes a Foreword by Rick Moody. An overlooked and spectacular novel, THE CHANGELING is a visionary fairy tale, a work of mythic genius. Terrifying, poetic, revelations follow THE CHANGELING's abandoned heroine Pearl everywhere she goes, whether by air, land, or sea. Joy Williams has won the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, among other prizes. Her first novel, State of Grace, was a National Book Award Finalist. The 3oth Anniversary Edition seeks to reintroduce this novel to contemporary readers as one of the most original and alarming fairy-tale books ever written.

The Changeling

DOUBLEDAY

A collection of Williams's short stories focuses on the disturbing, comic, moving, and revealing facets of ordinary domestic life in such tales as "The Farm," "Building," "The Woods," and "Preparation For a Collie"

Taking Care

Literary

From a true American master of the short story, comes a collection of disturbing, comic, and moving takes that find deeper meanings in ordinary domestic life. Here with unforgetable characters, places and events--a young divorcee, a shared summer home, a troubled family, a wedding, the death of a pet--Williams takes her readers on journey after journey, as only she can.

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

FLORIDA KEYS: HIS & GD

Willie and Liberty are drifters. They break into Florida vacation homes while the owners are away, stay a while, and then move on. They have been lovers since they were teenagers, yet Liberty now senses that Willie is drifting away from her—that their search, so relentless and mysterious, is becoming increasingly dangerous. An exhilarating cast of characters reflects this search, which is not just for home, but for self.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Williams, Joy.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Williams, Joy.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Williams, Joy.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Breaking and Entering

Ill Nature

The Quick and the Dead

The Florida Keys: A History & Guide, Ninth Edition

State of grace

The Changeling

Taking Care

Taking Care

FLORIDA KEYS: HIS & GD

Breaking and Entering