A Pulitzer Prize Finalist
From one of our most heralded writers--Joy Williams belongs, James Salter has written, "in the company of Celine, Flannery O'Connor, and Margaret Atwood"--her first novel in more than a decade: the 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...

From a true American master of the short story, comes acollection of disturbing, comic, and moving takes that find deeper meanings in ordinary domestic life.Here with unforgetable characters, places and events--a young divorcee, a shared summer home, a troubled family, a wedding, the death of a pet--Williams takes her readers on journey after journey, as only she can."

Nominated for the National Book Award in 1974, this haunting, profoundly disquieting novel manages to be at once sparse and lush, to combine Biblical simplicity with Gothic intensity and strangeness. It is the story of Kate, despised by her mother, bound to her father by ties stronger and darker than blood. It is the story of her attempted escapesa in detached sexual encounters, at a Southern college populated by spoiled and perverse beauties, and in a doomed marriage to a man who cannot understand what she is running from. Witty, erotic, searing acute, State of Grace bears the...