Honored Guest by Joy Williams

In short stories "so vibrant and alive they have heartbeats, the prose so electric and dazzling it makes the pulse race" ( Vanity Fair ), Joy Williams explores the various ways we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss, offering a rich examination of our capacity for transformation and salvation.

"Beautiful.... Unsettling.... [Contains] among the best American short stories." — The Atlantic Monthly

Her landscapes reach from Maine and Nantucket to the Southwest and into Mexico and Guatemala, while the events cover a range of human travail, from children confronting the death of a parent to parents instead burying their own young, and the various ways–comic, tragic, unnerving–we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss. And all of her characters are richly, idiosyncratically alive, in circumstances at once supremely peculiar and strangely like our own.