The Visiting Privilege New and Collected Stories [Paperback]

The legendary writer’s first collection in more than ten years—and, finally, the definitive one. A literary event of the highest order.

Joy Williams has been celebrated as a master of the short story for four decades, her renown passing as a given from one generation to the next even in the shifting landscape of contemporary writing. And at long last the incredible scope of her singular achievement is put on display: thirty-three stories drawn from three much-lauded collections, and another thirteen appearing here for the first time in book form. Forty-six stories in all, far and away the most comprehensive volume in her long career, showcasing her crisp, elegant prose, her dark wit, and her uncanny ability to illuminate our world through characters and situations that feel at once peculiar and foreign and disturbingly familiar. Virtually all American writers have their favorite Joy Williams stories, as do many readers of all ages, and each one of them is available here.“By one of the most celebrated American short-story writers. . . these forty-six stories are powerful, important, compassionate, and full of dark humor. This is a book that will be reread with admiration and love many times over.” —Nicole Jones,Vanity Fair

“This volume traces Joy Williams’s journey to sui generis master. Her nearest cousin among American writers is Don DeLillo, but only because, as with him, nobody writes sentences like she does. . . . Though she treats common states—parenthood, pet ownership, alcoholism—Williams eschews the realist story writer’s bromide that in the ordinary we find the extraordinary, because there’s nothing ordinary about her work.” —Christian Lorentzen,New York

“A fifty-course, full-tilt tasting menu of misanthropy and guile. This career-spanning collection solidifies Ms. Williams’s position as a thorny American writer of this first ranl3;