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Shop nowNinety-Nine Stories of God
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Learn morePulitzer 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’ 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.
Joy Williams is the author of five novels—including The Quick and the Dead, a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize—and four collections of stories, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among her many honors are the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2008.
Elisabeth Rodgers is an actress and AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator. After graduating from Princeton University, she completed a two-year program at William Esper Studio, where she studied with Maggie Flanigan. Her audiobook narration training came from Robin Miles, who has also directed her in several productions. She has recorded dozens of books for a multitude of publishers.
Reviews
“Wry and playful, except for when densely allusive and willfully obtuse, Ninety-Nine Stories of God is a treasure trove of bafflements and tiny masterpieces.”
“These ninety-nine religious-flavored vignettes may not tell you why we are here or where we are going, but they do possess the power to entrance.”
“Joy Williams’ quietly splendid fifth collection…has a surprising heft…The prose inside is airily laid out…funny, sage, and as meditative as a book of prayers.”
“Joy Williams’ stories are a humanist manifesto, a celebration of our most mysterious values, desires and prejudices.”
“Sly and wonderful…[Williams is] after some big truths in a few words, stories so short that some of them could fit on Twitter, except they’re too smart and not mean enough. ”
“These stories are 100 percent Williams: funny, unsettling, and mysterious, to be puzzled over and enjoyed across multiple readings.”
“Williams’ prose is simple and brutal, thoughtful and haunting. A spare but startling book. ”
“Admirers of Williams—and anyone who treasures a story well told should be one—will find much to like here.”
“Perfect little gems; it’s rare when such short works can truly satisfy.”
“Each narrative transforms the concept of god into a metaphor or coping mechanism meant to ease the anxieties of being human. At times, Ninety-nine Stories of God reads like a fabulist scripture, each vignette and flash-length vision bringing her audience closer to understanding the purpose behind the divine and our need to embrace or reject it.”
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