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The Pelican Child

Stories

Author Joy Williams
Read by Xe Sands, Roger Wayne, Cynthia Farrell, John Pirhalla
$18.00 US
Audio | Random House Audio
On sale Nov 18, 2025 | 4 Hours and 14 Minutes | 9798217165674
Sales rights: US, Canada, Open Mkt
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LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • A razor-sharp new collection of stories of visionary childhood misfits and struggling adult dreamers from this legendary writer of “perfectly indescribable fiction . . . To read Williams is to look into the abyss” (The Atlantic).

“Night was best, for, as everyone knows, but does not tell, the sobbing of the earth is most audible at night.” “Men are but unconscious machines and they perform their cruelties so effortlessly.” “Caring was a power she’d once possessed but had given up freely.” The sentences of Joy Williams are like no other—the coiled wit, the sense of a confused and ruined landscape, even the slight chortle of hope that lurks between the words—for the scrupulous effort of telling, in these eleven stories, has a ravishing beauty that belies their substance. We meet lost souls like the twin-sister heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune in “After the Haiku Period,” who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family's deeds; in “Nettle,” a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence; the ghost of George Gurdieff, on an obsessive visit to the Arizona birthplace of the shining Susan Sontag; the “pelican child” who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs. 

All of these characters insist on exploring, often at their peril, an indifferent and caustic world: they struggle against our degradation of the climate, of each other, and of honest human experience (“I try to relate only to what is immediately verifiable,” says one narrator ruefully), possibly in vain. But each brief, haunted triumph of understanding is celebrated by Williams, a writer for our time and all time.
  • LONGLIST | 2025
    National Book Award
One of the Boston Globe’s Best New Books for Fall
One of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025

“Painterly and provocative, slipping beyond the frame of reality, as if Magritte or Dalí had propped their easels amid the Sonoran desert. . . . Williams’s serious business is to plumb the volatile interior lives of her characters. . . . The prose is beautifully lean. . . . She flavors her pieces with piercing observations, a pinch of irony, and her signature moxie. She’s still got it, still mulling the riddles we pose to each other, and to ourselves.” —Hamilton Cain, Boston Globe

“The singular, disconcerting uneasiness that is so characteristic of Joy Williams’s fiction, yet so hard to pin down, is once again dazzlingly on display in her latest collection. . . . A detail from her prose can stop you in your tracks. . . . And sometimes you have to pause simply to ponder the insightful beauty of what is being observed.” —Cory Oldweiler, Minnesota Star Tribune

“In a dozen intricate, unnerving, caustically funny, and haunting tales, [Williams’s] lonely, displaced, and bewildered characters struggle with painful quandaries in a desiccated world. . . . These grim tales are so ravishingly well-made, so astutely imagined, they evoke as much awe as despair.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist
“Welcome to the Cult of Joy and Williams’s new collection, The Pelican Child. . . . These are some of the finest short stories in the last century of American literature, all heartbreaking and beautiful and elusive and true.” —Mike Jeffrey, On the Seawall

“An American master is back with crystalline stories that map the personal and political minefields of her unmoored characters. Williams blends everyday dramas with surreal imagery, her voice and range inspiring awe.” —Boston Globe, “Best New Books for Fall”

“Enigmatic, elegant stories by a writer at the pinnacle of her art. Williams has long worked magic with stories that, on the surface, seem quite quotidian, save that something unspoken—and occasionally sinister—lies beneath. . . . Superb, and yet more evidence that Williams should be next in line for the Nobel Prize in Literature.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

About

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • A razor-sharp new collection of stories of visionary childhood misfits and struggling adult dreamers from this legendary writer of “perfectly indescribable fiction . . . To read Williams is to look into the abyss” (The Atlantic).

“Night was best, for, as everyone knows, but does not tell, the sobbing of the earth is most audible at night.” “Men are but unconscious machines and they perform their cruelties so effortlessly.” “Caring was a power she’d once possessed but had given up freely.” The sentences of Joy Williams are like no other—the coiled wit, the sense of a confused and ruined landscape, even the slight chortle of hope that lurks between the words—for the scrupulous effort of telling, in these eleven stories, has a ravishing beauty that belies their substance. We meet lost souls like the twin-sister heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune in “After the Haiku Period,” who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family's deeds; in “Nettle,” a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence; the ghost of George Gurdieff, on an obsessive visit to the Arizona birthplace of the shining Susan Sontag; the “pelican child” who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs. 

All of these characters insist on exploring, often at their peril, an indifferent and caustic world: they struggle against our degradation of the climate, of each other, and of honest human experience (“I try to relate only to what is immediately verifiable,” says one narrator ruefully), possibly in vain. But each brief, haunted triumph of understanding is celebrated by Williams, a writer for our time and all time.

Awards

  • LONGLIST | 2025
    National Book Award

Praise

One of the Boston Globe’s Best New Books for Fall
One of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025

“Painterly and provocative, slipping beyond the frame of reality, as if Magritte or Dalí had propped their easels amid the Sonoran desert. . . . Williams’s serious business is to plumb the volatile interior lives of her characters. . . . The prose is beautifully lean. . . . She flavors her pieces with piercing observations, a pinch of irony, and her signature moxie. She’s still got it, still mulling the riddles we pose to each other, and to ourselves.” —Hamilton Cain, Boston Globe

“The singular, disconcerting uneasiness that is so characteristic of Joy Williams’s fiction, yet so hard to pin down, is once again dazzlingly on display in her latest collection. . . . A detail from her prose can stop you in your tracks. . . . And sometimes you have to pause simply to ponder the insightful beauty of what is being observed.” —Cory Oldweiler, Minnesota Star Tribune

“In a dozen intricate, unnerving, caustically funny, and haunting tales, [Williams’s] lonely, displaced, and bewildered characters struggle with painful quandaries in a desiccated world. . . . These grim tales are so ravishingly well-made, so astutely imagined, they evoke as much awe as despair.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist
“Welcome to the Cult of Joy and Williams’s new collection, The Pelican Child. . . . These are some of the finest short stories in the last century of American literature, all heartbreaking and beautiful and elusive and true.” —Mike Jeffrey, On the Seawall

“An American master is back with crystalline stories that map the personal and political minefields of her unmoored characters. Williams blends everyday dramas with surreal imagery, her voice and range inspiring awe.” —Boston Globe, “Best New Books for Fall”

“Enigmatic, elegant stories by a writer at the pinnacle of her art. Williams has long worked magic with stories that, on the surface, seem quite quotidian, save that something unspoken—and occasionally sinister—lies beneath. . . . Superb, and yet more evidence that Williams should be next in line for the Nobel Prize in Literature.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

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