Taking Care

by Joy Williams

Book Overview

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.

In these uncommonly good stories (The Chicago Tribune) 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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394729129
• ISBN13: 9780394729121
• Release Date: July 1985
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Joy Williams is a Genius

These stories are proof that she is one of the most original and gifted writers ever to have written in English.

On the 5th read - still brilliant

Once in awhile I get drawn back to Joy Williams work. State of Grace is one of my all time favorite novels. Joy Williams is one of the very few authors I read again and again, and I always come away inspired and entranced and somehow surprised. How can a story surprise you again and again? Because her descriptions are so unusual and so apt, her use of language so original, and the endings so absolutely inevitable and unexpected. She is given to seeing the most mundane, helpless, and unsavory things. Her characters are caught in their own beings like tigers prowling the limits of their cages, and what she says about them (and thus about the modern world) is all true and all wrapped in the endless hope that is the human condition.

Joy Williams is a terrific and terrifically funny writer.

In this collection of short stories, Joy Williams again demonstrates the brilliant precision of her writing, which is at once mordant and heartbreaking. An example is her description of a man and the baby he has been forced to care for due to his daughter's carelessness: "He comes back to the table and gives her a little more milk, a half jar of strained chicken and a few spoonfuls of dessert...The baby enjoys all equally. She is good. She eats rapidly and neatly. Sometimes she grasps the spoon, turns it around and thrusts the wrong end into her mouth. Of course there is nothing that cannot be done incorrectly." I heartily recommend anything written by Joy Williams. She should be better known than she is. She is an American original.