Joy Williams

"Joy Williams's landscapes reach from Maine and Nantucket to the Southwest and into Mexico and Guatemala, while the events cover a range of human travail, from children confronting the death of a parent to parents instead burying their own young, and the various ways - comic, tragic, unnerving - we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss."--BOOK JACKET.

Willie and Liberty are drifters. They break into Florida vacation homes while the owners are away, stay a while, and then move on. They have been lovers since they were teenagers, yet Liberty now senses that Willie is drifting away from her--that their search, so relentless and mysterious, is becoming increasingly dangerous.

Late in his life, writer Kogito Choko reconnects with his estranged friend, the filmmaker Goro Hanawa. Goro's subsequent suicide causes Kogito to examine and reexamine Goro's life for clues that will lead him to understand his friend's path.

The Legendary Writer's First collection in more than ten years - and finally, the definitive one. A literary event of the highest order. Joy Williams has been celebrated as a master of the short story for four decades, her renown passing as a given from one generation to the next even in the shifting landscape of contemporary writing. And at long last the incredible scope of her singluar achievement is put on display: thirty-three stories drawn from three much-lauded collections, and another thirteen appearing here for the first time in book form. Forty-six stories in all, far and away the most comprehensive volume in her long career, showcasing her crisp, elegant prose, her dark wit, and her uncanny ability to illuminate our world through characters and situations that feel at once peculiar and foreign and disturbingly familiar. Virtually all American writers have their favorite Joy Williams stories, as do many readers of all ages, and eachy one of them is available here. -- from dust jacket.

"Most of us watch with mild concern the fast disappearing wild spaces or the recurrence of pollution-related crises such as oil spills, toxic blooms in fertilizer-enriched rivers, and the increasing violence in our own country.". "Joy Williams sounds the alarm over the general disconnection from the natural world that our consumer culture has created. The culling of elephants, electron-probed chimpanzees, and the vanishing wetlands are just some of her subjects. Among Ill Nature's nineteen essays are: "Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp" on the way we love what we love to death; "The Killing Game," her famous anti-hunting essay that caused a furor when it first appeared in Esquire; "Safariland," on the state of wildlife in Africa; "The Animal People," tracking the movements of the animal rights movement; "The Case against Babies," on the blithe determination of American women to continue to populate the Earth.". "Williams refuses to compromise as the lashes out at the greed of Americans and decries our own turpitude. It is not enough to mourn the passing of the natural world, Ill Nature shouts. Get out of our homes and our cars and our cubicles and do something ... now."--BOOK JACKET.

This is a welcome mini-successor to Charlton Tebeau's out-of-print A History of Florida. Gannon (history, Univ. of Florida) has updated coverage of the state's long history to include minorities, women, and environmental concerns through the year of Hurricane Andrew, focusing more on social than political history. The book contains some minor factual errors: the town of Cedar Key is misspelled several times as Cedar Keys, which is an offshore wildlife refuge; Gannon laments the exclusionary policies of the Universities of Miami and Florida, which in the 1940s excluded blacks from sports teams, while ignoring the opportunities then afforded African Americans at A&M College, which produced renowned athletes Willie Gallimore and Althea Gibson. Despite these slips, Gannon's work belongs on all library shelves.