The Pelican Child : Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award - Joy Williams

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Nominated for the PEN/Jean Stein Book AwardLauded as the best story writer of our time, Joy Williams returns with a taut collection that responds to our modern dilemmas with her si gnature dry wit and deftness of touch. In sinister and shifting landscapes, we meet souls lost and found: from the twin heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune, who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family's deeds, to a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence, to the "pelican child", who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs. For readers of Lorrie Moore, Mary Gaitskill and George Saunders, these haunted stories examine the instincts separating us from the beastly and the divine. Show more