Harrow
Joy Williams“Death-haunted and perfectly indescribable fiction...To read Williams is to look into the abyss... [She] remains our great prophet of nothingness.” - Anthony Domestico, The Atlantic
Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked for greatness as a baby when she died for a moment, and then came back to life. After Khristen's boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and her mother disappears, she ranges across the dead landscape and finds a 'resort' on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call 'Big Girl' In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature's beauty.
"She practices... camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams’s imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colourations in the ecology around her.” - A.O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review
“The ridiculous, pigheaded, bemused, endlessly distracted and continuously self-sabotaging state of the future is the subject of this wonderfully goading satire... A blackly comic portrait of futility... This is sarcasm of a high, artistic order, reminiscent of no one quite so much as William Gaddis.” - Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
Rivetingly strange and beautiful, and delivered with Joy Williams's searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is their intertwined tale of paradise lost and of their reasons - against all reasonableness - to try and recover something of it.