Harrow

Reviews / Votes

She practices ... camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams's imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colorations in the ecology around her. -- A.O. Scott * The New York Times Book Review * As our world disintegrates, it will take what we think of as reality with it. Addressing this in fiction will be the job, partly, of a certain kind of modern mystic. Williams - great virtuoso of the unreal - is one of them -- Sam Byers * Guardian * A magnificent and moving novel [that excavates] the middle distance between silence and experience . . . Harrow is a piece of writing in the vein of Samuel Beckett or Franz Kafka, its humour weaponized by rage -- David L. Ulin * Los Angeles Times * Harrow's dark humour, nihilism and absurdist bent bear the author's idiosyncratic stamp ... [there are] glistening nuggets of humour and wordplay amid the doom * The Irish Times * Harrow belongs at the front of the pack of recent climate fiction ... A crabby, craggy, comfortless, arid, erudite, obtuse, perfect novel, a singular entry in a singular body of work by an artist of uncompromised originality and vision ... To read this novel is to know and to be known (Galatians 4:9) by a profound and comfortless alterity, to encounter the cosmic otherness at the very core of the self. -- Justin Taylor * Bookforum * Death-haunted and perfectly indescribable fiction ... To read Williams is to look into the abyss ... [She] remains our great prophet of nothingness -- Anthony Domestico * Atlantic * 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 * Wall Street Journal * Elegantly deranged ... A hypnotizing novel, funny in places and chilling in others, filled with wacky and tragic characters, that unspools the absurdity in just one of our many very possible bad futures. -- Emily Temple * Literary Hub * Williams's tone achiev[es] a new, perfectly hostile register ... [Her] vision of an annihilated earth seems to have flown from the brain of Francisco Goya ... As the novel continues, it plumbs ever-deeper zones of dystopian weirdness ... She practices a kind of hallucinogenic realism, which takes at face value the psychological flights of characters deranged by loss ... Williams has long written to the side of conventional English, pursuing a form that feels more commensurate with actual experience-with the terror, comedy, and mystery of moving through the world. -- New Yorker * Katy Waldman * Who better than Williams to capture pure-hearted but absurd efforts to retrieve paradise lost? * The Millions * Climate collapse is well underway and Joy Williams's Harrow deserves the Pulitzer Prize * Bookforum * The return of an American original ... Odd, witty and original * Guardian 2022 in books highlights * Brilliant and inspiring. Anyone new to her has a treat in store * The Times * Among the strangest, most exciting authors at work today * Daily Mail * Praise for Joy Williams: 'One of the great writers of her generation' * The New York Times * To read Joy Williams is to be arrested in a state of relentless awe and wonderment ... why we aren't worshipping Joy Williams in public squares is beyond me * Vanity Fair * She belongs in the company of Celine and Flannery O'Connor -- James Salter Williams is a flawless writer * NPR * Deep, dazzling, disconcerting -- Adam Foulds Joy Williams is simply a wonder -- Raymond Carver Electric and dangerously human -- Philip Hensher Cracked, morbidly hilarious ... a splintered vision of environmental collapse that seems somehow both gleefully nihilistic and yearningly spiritual * Wall Street Journal Top Ten Books of 2021 * Beautiful ... It's all pleasure, if pleasure of a bleak and violent sort. It's also often pretty funny, in a deadpan way -- Christian Lorentzen * Daily Telegraph * Her works are almost a well-kept secret. They should be much more widely read. Williams is a writer for our times: both visionary and caustic, knowing yet also full of wonder... Harrow's short, dense pages unfold into a world of Kafkaesque distortion, its sharp wit and cruelty pierced with dreamlike language and imagery, and moments of almost unbearable poignancy. As the book draws to its dark conclusion, a hint of something miraculous, borne out from its opening chapter, flutters over the final paragraphs. In Williams's shattered world, destruction appears almost like the possibility of renewal. * Financial Times * Harrow is unyielding in its moral purpose and raucously impious in its methods ... she has the syntactic equivalent of perfect pitch * the TLS *