A Year in Reading: Bill Morris

This was the year I finally, belatedly, decided to figure out why people make such a fuss about Joy Williams. Since 2015, her career-spanning collection, The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories, has been staring down from my bookshelf, daring me to find out if Williams’s fiercely dedicated fans know what they’re talking about. They do. These 33 stories drawn from earlier collections, plus 13 new ones, are a summation of a four-decade career that proves what her fans have known all along: Joy Williams is a master of the short story, one of our great fiction writers, a maker of sentences that veer and startle and delight, a conjurer of worlds that are at once unnerving and familiar, disorienting yet able to provide solace and even, on occasion, the possibility of redemption. She reminds us, in case we’ve fallen asleep, that the world is a deeply strange and wondrous place.

This collection’s title story displays