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.
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Like it says on the tin, these are 99 stories, all of them very short and easy to read. Many of them are about God, but the rest, well, if they are about God I couldn‰ЫЄt tell. I guess anything can be about God. Every story was well crafted, and every once in a while I came across a good one, but for the most part I hopped, skipped, and jumped my way through them with tiny twinges of feeling that I thought maybe were supposed to be stronger. My favourite stories were the goofy ones about the Lord, like ‰ЫПWet‰Ыќ, ‰ЫПParty‰Ыќ, ‰ЫПInoculum‰Ыќ, ‰ЫПDriveshaft‰Ыќ, and ‰ЫПA Little Prayer‰Ыќ, because such mild blasphemy makes me giggle nervously inside like I‰ЫЄm still a good little churchgoing girl.
