The sentences of Joy Williams are like no other for the scrupulous effort of telling, in these 11 stories, has a ravishing beauty that belies their substance. We meet lost souls like the twin-sister heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune, who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family's deeds; a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence; the ghost of George Gurdieff, on an obsessive visit to the Arizona birthplace of the shining Susan Sontag; the “pelican child” who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs. All of these characters insist on exploring, an indifferent and caustic world: they struggle against our degradation of the climate, of each other, and of honest human experience, possibly in vain. But each brief, haunted triumph of understanding is celebrated by Williams, a writer for our time and all time.