Almost half a century later, The Changeling remains as haunting and as visionary as on the day it was first published. Joy Williams is a virtuosic stylist and a singular thinker―a genius in every sense of the word.
When we first meet Pearl—young in years but advanced in her drinking—she’s on the lam, sitting at a hotel bar in Florida, throwing back gin and tonics with her infant son cradled in the crook of her arm. But her escape is brief, and the relief she feels at having fled her abusive husband, and the Northeastern island his family calls home, doesn’t last for long. Soon she’s being shepherded back. The island, for Pearl, is a place of madness and pain, and her round-the-clock drinking spurs on the former even if it dulls the latter.
With The Changeling, Joy Williams has blended, as Rick Moody writes, “the arresting improbabilities of magic realism, with the surrealism of the folkloric revival . . . and with the modernist foreboding of Under the Volcano,” and created something entirely original and entirely consuming.
Joy Williams is the author of five novels, including The Quick and the Dead and most recently Harrow, five collections of stories, including Concerning the Future of Souls and Ninety-Nine Stories of God, 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 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, the Paris Review’s Hadada Award, and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, to which she was elected in 2008. She lives in Arizona and Wyoming.
"Within a single sentence, Joy Williams can swerve from absurd profundity to wicked satire and back, all with miraculous economy and control. . . . A startlingly alive book, even more resonant today."—Dana Spiotta, Oprah Magazine (Editor's Pick)
"An elusive but enchanting work by one of America's greatest authors."—Kirkus Reviews
"Williams is a genius . . . The Changeling remains Williams’s fullest plunge into the uncanny and the magical. Give it a try. Let it cast its spell on you." —Lincoln Michel, BOMB Magazine
"The Changeling is not a novel. It is a shimmering postpartum hex, a vision hatched from the egg of a divinely original mind decades ago and now officially a classic. Joy Williams will be read long after we are all covered in ants." —Claire Vaye Watkins
"The Changeling is perverse and singular in the manner of all true enchantment. I have never come across anything quite like it, although its DNA is in almost all contemporary fiction that I love." —Kelly Link
"Joy Williams’ exquisite vision of mothers and monsters leaves me drunk with wonder. Her language is so powerful, her images so lush, my copy is dogeared on nearly every page."—Samantha Hunt
Almost half a century later, The Changeling remains as haunting and as visionary as on the day it was first published. Joy Williams is a virtuosic stylist and a singular thinker―a genius in every sense of the word.
When we first meet Pearl—young in years but advanced in her drinking—she’s on the lam, sitting at a hotel bar in Florida, throwing back gin and tonics with her infant son cradled in the crook of her arm. But her escape is brief, and the relief she feels at having fled her abusive husband, and the Northeastern island his family calls home, doesn’t last for long. Soon she’s being shepherded back. The island, for Pearl, is a place of madness and pain, and her round-the-clock drinking spurs on the former even if it dulls the latter.
With The Changeling, Joy Williams has blended, as Rick Moody writes, “the arresting improbabilities of magic realism, with the surrealism of the folkloric revival . . . and with the modernist foreboding of Under the Volcano,” and created something entirely original and entirely consuming.
Creators
Joy Williams is the author of five novels, including The Quick and the Dead and most recently Harrow, five collections of stories, including Concerning the Future of Souls and Ninety-Nine Stories of God, 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 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, the Paris Review’s Hadada Award, and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, to which she was elected in 2008. She lives in Arizona and Wyoming.
"Within a single sentence, Joy Williams can swerve from absurd profundity to wicked satire and back, all with miraculous economy and control. . . . A startlingly alive book, even more resonant today."—Dana Spiotta, Oprah Magazine (Editor's Pick)
"An elusive but enchanting work by one of America's greatest authors."—Kirkus Reviews
"Williams is a genius . . . The Changeling remains Williams’s fullest plunge into the uncanny and the magical. Give it a try. Let it cast its spell on you." —Lincoln Michel, BOMB Magazine
"The Changeling is not a novel. It is a shimmering postpartum hex, a vision hatched from the egg of a divinely original mind decades ago and now officially a classic. Joy Williams will be read long after we are all covered in ants." —Claire Vaye Watkins
"The Changeling is perverse and singular in the manner of all true enchantment. I have never come across anything quite like it, although its DNA is in almost all contemporary fiction that I love." —Kelly Link
"Joy Williams’ exquisite vision of mothers and monsters leaves me drunk with wonder. Her language is so powerful, her images so lush, my copy is dogeared on nearly every page."—Samantha Hunt
