Critical Essay by Gail Godwin
The fated heroine of this bleak but beautifully-crafted first novel ["State of Grace"] may well be the final, perfected archetype of all the "sad la...
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Critical Essay by Joyce Kornblatt
With prose of indiscriminate radiance, Williams creates a landscape for [the tales in Taking Care] at once geographic and spiritual….
These stories seem cl...
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Critical Essay by Brina Caplan
Taking Care, story by story and incident by incident, withdraws meaning from the lives it represents. In each case, what remains is a gem of despair, worked into the sh...
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Critical Essay by Rust Hills
State of Grace is a "difficult" novel, hard to get into and even then not easy to stay with. Williams is not [Jacqueline] Susann, after all. Time shifts are...
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Critical Essay by David Bromwich
[In State of Grace] Joy Williams is pouring forth a tepid Creative Writing ooze which has become stock in trade at the universities, and which is strictly a habit of ...
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Critical Essay by John Agar
Kate is the anesthetic woman [in State of Grace] whose life is too painful for her to face, who sees with a child's eye focused dissociatively on the foreground, wh...
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Critical Essay by Anatole Broyard
["State of Grace"] was a startlingly good novel, and it pains me to have to say that "The Changeling" is a startlingly bad one. Miss Will...
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Critical Essay by Alice Adams
[Joy Williams] is a talented, skillful writer. She evokes the feel and smell of certain moments with an eerie precision…. Certain characters, too, in her fiction,...
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Critical Essay by The Virginia Quarterly Review
Joy Williams, in [The Changeling], descends from the best of recent innovators in fiction. Like Cortázar and Márquez, she has a surrealis...
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Critical Essay by Patricia Meyer Spacks
[The impossibility of accurate memory is dealt with] in the increasingly surrealistic account of The Changeling, which retreats altogether from the public real...
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Critical Essay by David Quammen
[Joy Williams's "Taking Care" contains some] wonderfully crisp writing and patches of bleak humor that made me guffaw. Social disjunction and the ...
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"I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth." MALCOLM XI have sat in my Brooklyn, New York a...
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Critical Essay by Gail Godwin
Online Exclusive: Looking for America
