PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST - From one of our most heralded writers comes
the "poetic, disturbing, yet very funny" (The Washington Post Book
World) life-and-death adventures of three misfit teenagers in the
American desert.
Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely
circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the
third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned
landscape eccentric with signs and portents--from the preservation of
the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as
living in a wildlife museum--accompanied by restless, confounded adults.
A father lusts after his handsome gardener even as he's haunted
(literally) by his dead wife; a heartbroken dog runs afoul of an angry
neighbor; a young stroke victim drifts westward, his luck running from
worse to awful; a sickly musician for whom Alice develops an attraction
is drawn instead toward darker imaginings and solutions; and an aging
big-game hunter finds spiritual renewal through his infatuation with an
eight-year-old--the formidable Emily Bliss Pickless.
With nature thoroughly routed and the ambiguities of existence on full
display, life and death continue in directions both invisible and
apparent. Gloriously funny and wonderfully serious, The Quick and the
Dead limns the vagaries of love, the thirst for meaning, and the
peculiar paths by which all creatures are led to their destiny.
A panorama of contemporary life and an endlessly surprising tour de
force: penetrating and magical, ominous and comic, this is the most
astonishing book yet in Joy Williams's illustrious career.
Joy Williams belongs, James Salter has written, "in the company of
Céline, Flannery O'Connor, and Margaret Atwood." *
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