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“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.”
New York Times Book Review
A 2016 PEN/Malamud Award Winner
A New York Times Pick of Books We're Reading This Summer
An Amazon Best Book of the Month for July 2016
A BookRiot Pick for New Books of July 2016
A New York Times Editor’s Choice
A 2016 Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year, Top 10 Selection
A 2016 New York Times Book Review Notable Book
A Seattle Times Best Book of 2016
A Huffington Post Best Book of 2016
A Huffington Post Best Book of 2016
Longlisted for the 2017 Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize
Pulitzer 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.
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Vignettes may be short, but boy do they pack a punch. Much like poetry, each entry in this collection requires multiple listens. The first listen will give you the essence, but upon each repeated listens, a depth of meaning emerges. I’m not typically a fan of any book making “God” the focal point or theme of a book, unless it’s historical or nonfiction and isn't promoting a particular religion. But most of this collection possesses a subtlety that doesn’t beat the listener over the head with the notion of the divine creator. There were many that left me chuckling, too.
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