Description

‘A book completed by a master of the craft. Prepare to be moved’ Guardian

‘Holy, gorgeous and politically red-hot masterpieces’ Daily Telegraph

‘An intricate, perfectly articulated work of art’ Times Literary Supplement

Joy Williams offers ninety-nine illuminations on mortality as she brings her powers of observation to Azrael, the Angel of Death and transporter of souls.

Balancing the extraordinary and the humble, the bizarre and the beatific, the book presents Azrael as a thoughtful and troubled protagonist as he confronts the holy impossibility of his task, his uneasy relationship with Death and his friendship with the Devil. In this follow-up to Williams’ 99 Stories of God, a collection of connected beings – ranging from ordinary people to great artists such as Kafka, Nietzsche, Bach and Rilke to dogs, birds, horses and butterflies – experience the varying fate of the soul, transient yet everlasting.

Profound, sorrowful, witty and ecstatic, Concerning the Future of Souls will leave readers awestruck in their confrontation of life in the face of death.

Publisher Review

Praise for Joy Williams * : * Joy Williams is simply a wonder — Raymond Carver One of the great writers of her generation * The New York Times * Brilliant and inspiring. Anyone new to her has a treat in store * Times * Among the strangest, most exciting authors at work today * Daily Mail * As our world disintegrates, it will take what we think of as reality with it. Addressing this in fiction will be the job, partly, of a certain kind of modern mystic. Williams – great virtuoso of the unreal – is one of them — Sam Byers * Guardian * Climate collapse is well underway and Joy Williams’s Harrow deserves the Pulitzer Prize * Bookforum * She practices … camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams’s imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colorations in the ecology around her — A.O. Scott * The New York Times Book Review * A magnificent and moving novel [that excavates] the middle distance between silence and experience …. Harrow is a piece of writing in the vein of Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka, its humour weaponized by rage * Los Angeles Times * Harrow’s dark humour, nihilism and absurdist bent bear the author’s idiosyncratic stamp … [there are] glistening nuggets of humour and wordplay amid the doom * Irish Times * Death-haunted and perfectly indescribable fiction … To read Williams is to look into the abyss … [She] remains our great prophet of nothingness * Atlantic * The ridiculous, pigheaded, bemused, endlessly distracted and continuously self-sabotaging state of the future is the subject of this wonderfully goading satire … A blackly comic portrait of futility … [Harrow] is sarcasm of a high, artistic order, reminiscent of no one quite so much as William Gaddis * Wall Street Journal * Elegantly deranged … [Harrow is] a hypnotizing novel, funny in places and chilling in others, filled with wacky and tragic characters, that unspools the absurdity in just one of our many very possible bad futures * Literary Hub * Williams’s tone achiev[es] a new, perfectly hostile register … [Her] vision of an annihilated earth seems to have flown from the brain of Francisco Goya … As the novel continues, it plumbs ever-deeper zones of dystopian weirdness … She practices a kind of hallucinogenic realism, which takes at face value the psychological flights of characters deranged by loss … Williams has long written to the side of conventional English, pursuing a form that feels more commensurate with actual experience-with the terror, comedy, and mystery of moving through the world * New Yorker * Who better than Williams to capture pure-hearted but absurd efforts to retrieve paradise lost? * The Millions * [Harrow is] the return of an American original … Odd, witty and original — 2022 in books highlights * Guardian * To read Joy Williams is to be arrested in a state of relentless awe and wonderment … why we aren’t worshipping Joy Williams in public squares is beyond me * Vanity Fair * She belongs in the company of Celine and Flannery O’Connor — James Salter Williams is a flawless writer * NPR * Deep, dazzling, disconcerting — Adam Foulds Electric and dangerously human — Philip Hensher Cracked, morbidly hilarious … a splintered vision of environmental collapse that seems somehow both gleefully nihilistic and yearningly spiritual — Top Ten Books of 2021 * Wall Street Journal * Her works are almost a well-kept secret. They should be much more widely read. Williams is a writer for our times: both visionary and caustic, knowing yet also full of wonder… Harrow’s short, dense pages unfold into a world of Kafkaesque distortion, its sharp wit and cruelty pierced with dreamlike language and imagery, and moments of almost unbearable poignancy. As the book draws to its dark conclusion, a hint of something miraculous, borne out from its opening chapter, flutters over the final paragraphs. In Williams’s shattered world, destruction appears almost like the possibility of renewal * Financial Times * Harrow is unyielding in its moral purpose and raucously impious in its methods … she has the syntactic equivalent of perfect pitch * Times Literary Supplement *