Portland Press Herald (Maine) 11-14-2001 Portland Press Herald (Maine) Wednesday, November 14, 2001 Edition: FINAL Section: Food & Health Page: 2C Portland-- Lucinda Williams was originally slated to bring her bluesy brand of country/folk to Portland on Sept. 11, but the pleasures...

Bill Joy may already be a legend in his own run-time, but Sun's visionary chief scientist just cannot stop inventing things THIS week Sun Microsystems revealed the first details of a new superchip that it is betting will become a standard for...

"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 apartment, quietly, for several days now, too perplexed...

With prose of indiscriminate radiance, Williams creates a landscape for [the tales in Taking Care] at once geographic and spiritual…. These stories seem closest in spirit to the fictions of Flannery O'Connor and Joyce Carol Oates. Madness, murder, the surrender of hope become commonplace rather than extreme behaviors, and even those characters who sustain the ability to love seem perplexed, even encumbered, by their triumph….

[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 the permanently would-be novelist. Here are a few of her more wonderfully worked-over set pieces: "Almost all arms and noons and lips and anger are the same and love." "I don't look at all pregnant and never would have thought it of myself, but I've been told firmly that it's so. I peed into a paper cup...

[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, are entirely original and absolutely credible…. The evidence suggests that Miss Williams could and probably will write an excellent novel, which "The Changeling," unfortunately, is not. Its action, more or less (Miss Williams does not exactly spell out her narrative), is this: A young woman, Pearl, is picked up while sh...