oNe oF THe DaRKeST TaLeS i'Ve eVeR ReaD. VeRy DeeP aND THouGHT PRoVoKiNG...a BooK i'Ve ReCoMMeNDeD MaNY MaNY TiMeS iN THe YeaRS SiNCe i FiRST ReaD iT.

The 1st time I read this book, I flipped it over & began again the second I finished the last page. That was 6 years ago and I have read it many times since. Joy williams tells a sort of falling-out-of-love story...very touching, very poetic, often very funny. The isolation everyone feels in modern society is an omnipresent theme & it is often explored here with a surreal exactness.

like the above review notes, there is no reason why Joy Williams isn't a widely read and appreciated author. breaking and entering is a chilling story of isolation, paranoia and senseless postmodernity. The every-word-perfect prose reminds me of Nabokov in that the book is genius just for the way she twists and fashions language into an entirely convincing, if often surreal, journey into secret inner lives. look also for her story "trains" in the vintage contemporaries anthology of short fiction.

I didn't think it got better than Joy's Way, but this book is deeper and richer than ever. It's not a book; it's an experience. Don't miss it.

I have not read this book yet but yearning to get one immediately. It was highly recommended by my Guru..He has read it & has changed his life.. Pls get in touch with me & let me know who's the publisher & where can I get it from. I'm currently in capitol of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur....

This cd is a great way for families to make good use of downtime spent in cars. It combines biographical detail (kids will be fascinated by such everyday Elizabethan images as traitors' heads on spikes on London's Tower Bridge) with fascinating literary and cultural analysis (rap-weary parents will be intellectually intrigued). Quotations from premier academic authorities are interspersed with appropriate period music and short excerpts from the Bard himself. It flows like an NPR report, and you may find yourself sitting in the car to finish it even after you've reached your destination!

My whole family enjoyed Getting to Know William Shakespeare. We loved the music, the analysis of his plays, and the interesting facts about his life. The professors on the CD make Shakespeare very accessable to all of us with funny stories and interesting historical background. If you don't know anything about him, you will find this great to listen to. And if you have read his plays, you will also learn something about his craft. The CD is very entertaining. I highly recommend it.

I picked up this book quite by accident, having been recommended to another Williams, or, perhaps, another Joy. Frustrated, I glanced at the first page, and, finding it not repellent, read a bit more. The next thing I knew, I was immersed in something extraordinary and rare. It's amazing--and depressing--that a book like this can exist, no longer heralded, buried on a shelf in a bookstore where a handful of people might discover it by accident. About the book there is little to say that can adequately describe what it's like, except that it's like plunging into the soul of a very particular young woman.

One of my all time favorites! I've written graduate essays on the book and always list it as being a major influence on my own writing. Joy Williams is one of the few authors who can describe the world's craziness and how we live in it.

Once in awhile I get drawn back to Joy Williams work. State of Grace is one of my all time favorite novels. Joy Williams is one of the very few authors I read again and again, and I always come away inspired and entranced and somehow surprised. How can a story surprise you again and again? Because her descriptions are so unusual and so apt, her use of language so original, and the endings so absolutely inevitable and unexpected. She is given to seeing the most mundane, helpless, and unsavory things. Her characters are caught in their own beings like tigers prowling the limits of their cages, and what she says about them (and thus about the modern world) is all true and all wrapped in the endless hope that is the human condition.

In this collection of short stories, Joy Williams again demonstrates the brilliant precision of her writing, which is at once mordant and heartbreaking. An example is her description of a man and the baby he has been forced to care for due to his daughter's carelessness: "He comes back to the table and gives her a little more milk, a half jar of strained chicken and a few spoonfuls of dessert...The baby enjoys all equally. She is good. She eats rapidly and neatly. Sometimes she grasps the spoon, turns it around and thrusts the wrong end into her mouth. Of course there is nothing that cannot be done incorrectly." I heartily recommend anything written by Joy Williams. She should be better known than she is. She is an American original.

Anselm shows clearly in this splendid book on the religion and spirituality of this world that Faith is indeed truly Joyful. He uses the most visual images to prove the fun and happiness that is stored on the very batteries of Faith, the thing that drives our very Churches and Temples of various religions. A great read, I find best red whilst listening to Richard Addinsell's Warsaw Concerto. A true masterpiece of spiritual enlightenment.

Jeannie is a dear friend, and a great writer. You'll find something here that's a long ways away from the typical mystery - this one actually has some real imagination and plot twists to it. If that isn't enough to grab you, it's worth the money just to place the book on a coffee table in your house and watch people gawk at the title. Finally , if that's not enough to induce a purchase, the book has a pretty decent foreword in it. And the world can never have enough good forewords.

I m the new Director of Quality Assurance in a non profit children and family organization. The clarity and learning points and practical application of TQM principles in this book are exceptional. The book compares and contrasts many of the old traditional means of doing business, with more efficient and reliable, measureable means to quality management. I particularly like how the whole process of TQM is considered when comparing Japanese and American practices back in the 1980's when it became obvious for American businesses to re-examine their practices. The quality products of the Japanese were a result of using TQM princples. The books states that for every dollar we spent on prevention we spend $100 fixing problems. If all agencys did business with prevention in mind with TQM principles, many hours of headaches and problem solving would never occur, quality services, increased financial utilization, staff ownership and efficient operations would develop. There are 7 key points to developing TQM in your organization. Utilizing all seven ppoint are explained and key learning points in each chapter help capsulize each key point. I also liked the self-audit at the end of the book to help me understand where our TQM focus must be directed. Offering quality services from the onset of service delivery means fixing the problem before the problem occurs is the premise for TQM. This book capsualizes the need to and provides clarity to apply the TQM principles for the beginning organization and the seasoned or grinding organization looking for a new efficient means to manage. There is no one way to organize TQM in any agency, you have apply what works for your organization. This book has helped me conceptualize and provide evidence for the need to change and practice TQM principles.

I've read this to my daughters and given it to their friends. Classics are hard to come by now-a-days.

Highly recommended

I discovered Tucson writer Joy Williams through her essay,
"Hawk." About her "big black German shepherd" (p.184)
she writes, Hawk "was my sweetie pie, my honey, my handsome boy,
my love. On the following day he would attack me as though he wanted
to kill me"(p.185).

Williams' collection of 19 no-nonsense
"rants and reflections" is a confrontational wake-up call.
Each year three million migratory songbirds slam into towers and their
guy wires (p.20). Seven thousand acres are lost each day in this country
to land developers.(p.129) We are overpopulating the planet with
"babies, babies, babies," Williams observes, "those
heirs, those hopes, those products of our species' selfishness,
sentimentality and global death wish"(p. 105). Neither hunters nor
animal rights' activists escape the rant that becomes a roar in these
pages. "Honor non-human life," Williams writes.
"Control yourself, become more authentic, live lightly upon the
earth and treat it with respect. Redefine the word progress and
dismiss the managers and masters. Grow inwardly and with knowledge
become truly wiser. Think differently, behave differently"(p.21).
I couldn't put this book of eye-opening essays down. And for another
rant you'll remember, try Ferenc Mate's A REASONABLE LIFE
(2000). G. Merritt

Death and suffering are a big part of writing. A big part. (To paraphrase and turn upon the gifted Joy Williams; see page 49.) And you can't waste satire or pure hardcore ridicule on targets unworthy of the name. You've got to go after the people who kill animals, and you can't spare anybody. Sure it's duck soup to take aim at the National Rifle Association and the few Big Game Machos left in the world. Duck soup. And the sickie scientists who lobotomize chimps and torture rabbits just to see how long they can take it, their white coats starched and pressed, their nimble fingers taking copious notes. These targets are too easy. In the final analysis you gotta get the burger eaters, every one of them, not just the Super-Sized that waddle into the Burger King or the suburban Mommas sneaking out of the Krispy Kreme, bags of donuts like warm puppies under both arms, mouths stuffed. No, you've got to get the photo safari people who kill merely with their privileged, ignorant, dilettante PRESENCE in jungleland, a lily-livered affront to nature, over-tipping the guides and spilling martinis and overexposed film onto the purity of the veldt.

At any rate, this is the Joy Williams rant, and what I say is rant on, Voltaire!

This collection of magazine essays begins with "Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp" in which Williams goes after the wishy-washy, faux lovers of nature, addressing them (in effect) as hey "you" with the "Big Gulp cups." Next is a short-short about rhesus monkeys being raised for laboratory research on an island charmingly called "Key Lois" (Laboratory Observing Island Simians). Williams follows this with "Safariland" in which she makes fun of the photo safari experience, reducing it to a kind of Disneyland with mosquito netting.

So far Joy Williams is just satirizing. Next comes a particularly brutal short-short on wildebeests, how they can't migrate to water during the dry season as they have for millions of years because there's a cattle fence that keeps them from the water they can smell. Williams is particularly vivid as she describes thousands of them up against the fence dying of thirst. But she's only warming up. In the next piece, "The Killing Game" and in a later piece, "The Animal People" we experience the full monty of Joy Williams unleashed. Now her writing becomes (as she describes it in the final essay entitled "Why I Write") "unelusive and strident and brashly one-sided." Her words are "meant to annoy and trouble and polarize, and they made readers...half nuts with rage and disdain." (pp. 209-210)

I believe it. I too love the animals, but I'd bet protozoa to primates that she'd find my efforts sadly lacking and my attitude wimpishly laissez faire.

I guess the best way to demonstrate the intent and style of this remarkable book is to just quote Joy Williams. Here's the opening lines of "The Case against Babies":

BABIES, BABIES, BABIES. There's a plague of babies. Too many rabbits or elephants or mustangs or swans brings out the myxomatosis, the culling guns, the sterility drugs, the scientific brigade of egg smashers. Other species can "strain their environments" or "overrun their range" or clash with their human "neighbors," but human babies are always welcome at life's banquet. Welcome, Welcome, Welcome--Live Long and Consume!

Joy Williams really is a kind of earthy Voltaire, a kind of meat cleaver (as opposed to rapier) Voltaire, a kind of take no prisoners master of satire, burlesque, ridicule and just plain old verbal assassination.

But she raises a profound and demoralizing question: what IS going to happen to all the animals that we claim to love so much? Both Joy Williams and I know. Only those fully compatible with humans (dogs, cats, aquarium fish) or those we can't do anything about (rats, mice, crows, sea gulls, sparrows) will survive. Joy knows this and she's angry. Her anger shows. But she's also resigned and that shows too. I know this not merely because of her tone but because of what she writes on page 209: "Nothing the writer can do is ever enough."

The denouement of the book (strangely it has one; Joy Williams is an artist) comes in the penultimate essay, "Hawk." Here we are stunned to learn that "Hawk," her German shepherd dog, whom she referred to as "my sweetie pie, my honey, my handsome boy, my love," whom she would kiss fondly on the nose, turned on her one day as she was leaving him at the vet and savagely bit into and ripped at her breast and then gnawed her arms, and had to be not destroyed, but given euthanasia and cremated.

I don't know what to say about this benumbing turn. Really I think Joy Williams is an artist whose inner artistic nature rises over and above her normal consciousness and tells us the truth in a way ordinary consciousness never could; and even here in a collection of non-fictional essays she has consciously or unconsciously employed the techniques of the master story teller that she is, and left us with a queasy sense of the madness of life while demonstrating that there is so much beyond our understanding.

This extraordinary book should be read not so much for the overpowering arguments against our misuse of animals, or for the undeniable demonstration of our "ill nature," but for the perfect power of her words. Anyone with any pretension toward mastery of language ought to read Joy Williams. In doing so we too might learn to write, as she does, in a manner that is "beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control." (p. 210)

Joy Williams takes a clear-eyed look at the greedy, short-sighted and uncompassionate ways of humans, particularly the gluttonous, over-consuming American horde, and what small-brained humanoids have done to the natural world and the creatures who share this water planet.

The truth may set you free, but first it will make you miserable --- if your heart has not been sanitized, plasticized, and chemicalized into stuporous numbness. Williams outlines the enormity of the forces arrayed against those who would preserve some of this beleaguered planet for the plants and animals and natural lifeforms.

With ironical humor, razor wit and passionate uncommon sense, Williams takes aim at industrial agriculture, federal Wildlife Services (which "manages" wildlife by killing it), fertility clinics which allows infertile women to birth litters of babies on this overtaxed planet, hunters and the whole panoply of unbridled growth-is-good ideologues.(Unbridled growth, Edward Abbey wrote, is the ideology of the cancer cell.)

What gourmands call veal and seafood are, in reality, the corpses of slaughtered animals. Williams opens the blinders to reveal the reality behind the modern consumerist lifestyle and while it is not pretty, there is a dark and twisted humor to it.

Williams puts her money where her mouth is. When she had to sell some land she owned in Florida, she insisted, over the bellowing of the realtors, on deed restrictions that would preserve the land's natural character. Eventually, a nature-loving buyer appeared. Good show. I have had similar thoughts about preserving the trees on my little land; thanks to this author for giving me hope that I can protect them. Keep writing, Joy Williams, words can make a difference.

Buy this book, take it to heart, hear the clarion call, get sane, change your life!