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Ninety-Nine Stories of God
At a hot-dog-eating contest or at a demolition derby, in line at the pharmacy counter waiting for a shingles vaccination, living in a cave with a colony of bats: the Almighty appears in ever-more mysterious ways in Ninety-Nine Stories of God, Joy Williams' surreal, sublime new collection of very short short stories. Each less than a page long, each packing a punch belied by its size, every one of these ninety-nine stories tells of everyday human interaction with an increasingly elusive and arbitrary deity.
Haunted by an array of extraordinary historical figures, from Kafka and Tolstoy to O. J. Simpson and Philip K. Dick, but populated by anonymous ordinary people just like you and me, the stories pool seemingly random moments into something deep, dazzling and disconcerting. Bleak and funny, ironic and lyrical, enigmatic and aphoristic, Ninety-Nine Stories of God breaks down the barriers between the everyday and the divine and takes Williams' writing into territories strange and new.
160 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 22, 2013
174 people are currently reading
4214 people want to read
About the author
Joy Williams
78 books872 followersWilliams is the author of four novels. Her first, State of Grace (1973), was nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Quick and the Dead (2000), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her first collection of short stories was Taking Care, published in 1982. A second collection, Escapes, followed in 1990. A 2001 essay collection, Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Honored Guest, a collection of short stories, was published in 2004. A 30th anniversary reprint of The Changeling was issued in 2008 with an introduction by the American novelist Rick Moody.
Her stories and essays are frequently anthologized, and she has received many awards and honors, including the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rea Award for the Short Story.
Her stories and essays are frequently anthologized, and she has received many awards and honors, including the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rea Award for the Short Story.
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October 21, 2017
Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey--Redux
[updated 10/21/17] *3.6 stars
The 99 sketches in this book reminded me of the old Saturday Night Live "Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey," two perfect examples being,
I received an ARC from net galley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
[updated 10/21/17] *3.6 stars
The 99 sketches in this book reminded me of the old Saturday Night Live "Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey," two perfect examples being,
If you get invited to your first orgy, don't just show up nude. That's a common mistake. You have to let nudity 'happen.'Most though are a little longer (none more than 2 pages) and not as humorous. The following quote could truly be confused with a "story" from this book (i do not say this in jest).
If you ever discover that what you're seeing is a play within a play, just slow down, take a deep breath and hold on for the ride of your life.
If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is, 'God is crying.' And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is, 'Probably because of something you did.'And yet, some of the stories are quite poignant and/or profound. That's really the best summary review I can give to this odd little book.
I received an ARC from net galley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
April 28, 2019
Hypnotic, intelligent, lovely book of (loosely) linked flash fiction - Williams is a GREAT writer and many of the vignettes stand out as masterpieces of the short short form (I particularly like 25: "Veracity"). I'll be recommending this book for a long time. I did have slightly less affection for some of the stories in which God APPEARS instead of simply exists in the background - those lean a bit too hard on their punchlines and speak to befuddlement instead of the calm slant observation that Williams specializes in. I most loved the sequences that appeared to work as free association (stories 76-80 have a great flow), and Williams is really canny with her usage of real-world figures too.
January 1, 2016
I thought that Joy Williams collection of short stories, 99 Stories of God might be a sort of collection of fictional devotions. And I suppose they might be, if one expanded the definition of "devotion" beyond recognition!
The stories are very short, somewhat like those of Lydia Davis; most of them are one or two pages and but many are even shorter-a paragraph or a few lines.
But how wonderful they are! God figures in them but often obliquely. Sometimes He seems to be irrelevant to the lives of the people in the story, other times he appears more baffled than the other characters at what happens. There are some true "stories" mixed in among the more purely fictional ones, stories that are quotes from William James or Simone Weil. O.J. Simpson makes an appearance as well.
The range of the stories is wide. They are often dark but funny as well. In fact, I found many of them, despite the bleak portrayal of human life, hilarious.
I am grateful to Tin House Books and NetGalley for giving me an advance copy of this very exciting collection. I can't wait to read them again!
The stories are very short, somewhat like those of Lydia Davis; most of them are one or two pages and but many are even shorter-a paragraph or a few lines.
But how wonderful they are! God figures in them but often obliquely. Sometimes He seems to be irrelevant to the lives of the people in the story, other times he appears more baffled than the other characters at what happens. There are some true "stories" mixed in among the more purely fictional ones, stories that are quotes from William James or Simone Weil. O.J. Simpson makes an appearance as well.
The range of the stories is wide. They are often dark but funny as well. In fact, I found many of them, despite the bleak portrayal of human life, hilarious.
I am grateful to Tin House Books and NetGalley for giving me an advance copy of this very exciting collection. I can't wait to read them again!
February 21, 2017
If you or I wrote these stories and submitted them to a publisher, they'd be rejected. Bizarre and nonsensical, even the brevity of the pieces doesn't save them from tediousness. They may provide your eyes with some exercise . . .in eyeball-rolling at the author's pretentious "cleverness." Obviously not my cup of tea.
August 15, 2016
I have intended to read Joy Williams for some time and now, thanks to Tin House Books and NetGalley I've had a great introduction. These are most definitely not traditional stories of God's intercession with man as read in religious works. These are everyday experiences that reveal the human and seem to border on something other. At times, The Lord shows up personally to check in on humans, but not in a majestic way, more in a personal, often perplexed way given how humankind seems to be dealing with the world now a days.
These stories vary in length from a couple of sentences to a couple of pages (at the most). Most are no longer than a long paragraph or two. Some are bitingly satiric. Some are achingly sad. Some require time for the words to sink in. A few left me completely befuddled. I consider such a mix a wonderful success. My brain and heart were challenged.
If one is looking for traditional religious writing here, you will probably be disappointed. But if you are open to the religious experience that exists in all of life then this may well be for you. I just found a sentence from one of my status updates written while reading which I will include here: "The general theme of God can be taken in many ways, some quite traditional and literal, while others seem to be more related to the gods of life today." This was my view about 2/3rds through and seems a good summary of these short fictions.
I do recommend it for those who enjoy this story form---which I am enjoying more and more.
A copy of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review.
These stories vary in length from a couple of sentences to a couple of pages (at the most). Most are no longer than a long paragraph or two. Some are bitingly satiric. Some are achingly sad. Some require time for the words to sink in. A few left me completely befuddled. I consider such a mix a wonderful success. My brain and heart were challenged.
If one is looking for traditional religious writing here, you will probably be disappointed. But if you are open to the religious experience that exists in all of life then this may well be for you. I just found a sentence from one of my status updates written while reading which I will include here: "The general theme of God can be taken in many ways, some quite traditional and literal, while others seem to be more related to the gods of life today." This was my view about 2/3rds through and seems a good summary of these short fictions.
I do recommend it for those who enjoy this story form---which I am enjoying more and more.
A copy of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review.
July 24, 2016
[UPDATED REVIEW: 23 JULY '16]
Many reviewers here on GR have mentioned that the "stories" in this book might better be called zen koans. I checked my copy of Alan Watts' The Way of Zen to see if this description is apt. (It is.) Watts says the koan is a type of puzzle, the answer to which must be intuitively and spontaneously grasped. Some examples:
Question : Everybody has a place of birth. Where is your place of birth?
Answer : Early this morning I ate white rice gruel. Now I’m hungry again.
Question : How is my hand like the Buddha’s hand?
Answer Playing the lute under the moon.
Question : How is my foot like a donkey’s foot?
Answer : When the white heron stands in the snow it has a different color.
The purpose of the Koan is to provoke a "great doubt" in the student of Zen, and so expand the mind to make room for a great insight.
In many ways, the ninety-nine stories are just like these koans. For one, almost all of them are utterly bewildering. Take these koan-like stories, for example:
94
... in other areas of the country, shopkeepers have threatened mass suicide to protest eighteen to twenty hours of power blackouts every day...
IF YOU FEEL YOU MUST
92
I have never known an insane person, he said. But I have known people who later became dead.
DISTINCTION
A great deal of the stories were like these, in that they made me go, wuuuuuuuuuuuuut?
The purpose of the bewildering ninety-nine stories is, I think, essentially the same as the zen koans: to provoke "great doubt," or, as Williams says, to "push our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing" (NAKED MIND). ninety-nine thus challenges all of our regular conceptions of God: He attends hotdog eating contests, participates in a demolition derby, and adopts a turtle. All of this to unsettle facile conceptions of God and push us off the cliff of transcendence. Many of the stories are as seemingly nonsensical as Zen Koans, but they likewise succeed at stretching the mind beyond its normal boundaries.
In NAKED MIND, Williams describes her theology (and her God) this way:
49
One should not define God in human language nor anthropomorphize that which is ineffable and indescribable.
We can only know what God is not, not what God is.
We can never speak about God rationally as we speak about ordinary things, but that does not mean we should give up thinking about God. We must push our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing.
The only thing that can be said for sure about Joy Williams’ God is that He is an animal rights activist. THE LORD is a rather absentee god; when He does decide to intervene, usually He acts through animals: a stray dog saves an abandoned baby; a pig rescues a drowning man. THE LORD boycotts a party because they serve caviar. At his own dinner parties He serves “a mixure of fifty pure chemicals [. . . ] all made from rocks, air, and water without any killing at all” (poem 31). He prefers the company of wolves and bats to humans. Probably a third or more—if not fully half— of the 99 stories are principally concerned with animals: vegetarianism, hunting, cruelty, human-animal companionship. Flannery O’Connor famously said that Southern Fiction was Christ-Haunted; ninety-nine stories of GOD is beast-haunted.
I have a lot of sympathy for Williams' preoccupation with animals. Like Williams, all saints of God have exulted in animals; St. Francis call the birds his “brothers”, held mass with the fish, and made friends of wolves. But I doubt whether Williams’ vague apophatic theology has the coherence or the substance to sustain her (and her God’s) animal activism. There seems to be a contradiction nestled in her negative theology: if we cannot know anything about God, how can we argue with any confidence for the dignity of animals or the divine injustice of animal cruelty?
Still, some of these stories were fun to read for their koan-like strangeness and the sense they give that one reading will not suffice to tease out subtler meanings.
My favorite story, number 28, hilariously captures Truths all believers will instantly recognize: the weakness of the flesh and the fleeting nature of spiritual experiences:
28
He was reading the fourteenth canto of Dante’s Inferno at 2:30 on Good Friday morning. The readings had begun the evening before. There were twenty-seven cantos at half-hour intervals. He liked his slot. It was a good canto—lively—some of them could put you to sleep. His was the third ring of the Seventh Circle, the ring of burning sand which torments those who were violent against God, Art, and Nature.
There were only half a dozen people there, but he read in a powerful, pleasant voice, stumbling over no word. It was a moving presentation, with the bells and silences. It was a tradition at St. Philip’s.
When he left, the stars were shining. It was a beautiful night, save for someone in a BMW cutting through the church’s parking lot at high speed to shave forty seconds off of wherever he was going.
Without reflection, he put out his hand and extended the middle finger.
ABANDON ALL HOPE.
My other favorite stories (with asterisks to mark those stories I will want to read to students in my classroom):
1—Postcard*
3—Aubade*
16—If picked or uprooted these beautiful flowers will disappear*
9—Clean
32—Shaken
33—Irreducible
36—Dearest
65—Dull
72—Whale
87—Plot*
Many reviewers here on GR have mentioned that the "stories" in this book might better be called zen koans. I checked my copy of Alan Watts' The Way of Zen to see if this description is apt. (It is.) Watts says the koan is a type of puzzle, the answer to which must be intuitively and spontaneously grasped. Some examples:
Question : Everybody has a place of birth. Where is your place of birth?
Answer : Early this morning I ate white rice gruel. Now I’m hungry again.
Question : How is my hand like the Buddha’s hand?
Answer Playing the lute under the moon.
Question : How is my foot like a donkey’s foot?
Answer : When the white heron stands in the snow it has a different color.
The purpose of the Koan is to provoke a "great doubt" in the student of Zen, and so expand the mind to make room for a great insight.
In many ways, the ninety-nine stories are just like these koans. For one, almost all of them are utterly bewildering. Take these koan-like stories, for example:
94
... in other areas of the country, shopkeepers have threatened mass suicide to protest eighteen to twenty hours of power blackouts every day...
IF YOU FEEL YOU MUST
92
I have never known an insane person, he said. But I have known people who later became dead.
DISTINCTION
A great deal of the stories were like these, in that they made me go, wuuuuuuuuuuuuut?
The purpose of the bewildering ninety-nine stories is, I think, essentially the same as the zen koans: to provoke "great doubt," or, as Williams says, to "push our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing" (NAKED MIND). ninety-nine thus challenges all of our regular conceptions of God: He attends hotdog eating contests, participates in a demolition derby, and adopts a turtle. All of this to unsettle facile conceptions of God and push us off the cliff of transcendence. Many of the stories are as seemingly nonsensical as Zen Koans, but they likewise succeed at stretching the mind beyond its normal boundaries.
In NAKED MIND, Williams describes her theology (and her God) this way:
49
One should not define God in human language nor anthropomorphize that which is ineffable and indescribable.
We can only know what God is not, not what God is.
We can never speak about God rationally as we speak about ordinary things, but that does not mean we should give up thinking about God. We must push our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing.
The only thing that can be said for sure about Joy Williams’ God is that He is an animal rights activist. THE LORD is a rather absentee god; when He does decide to intervene, usually He acts through animals: a stray dog saves an abandoned baby; a pig rescues a drowning man. THE LORD boycotts a party because they serve caviar. At his own dinner parties He serves “a mixure of fifty pure chemicals [. . . ] all made from rocks, air, and water without any killing at all” (poem 31). He prefers the company of wolves and bats to humans. Probably a third or more—if not fully half— of the 99 stories are principally concerned with animals: vegetarianism, hunting, cruelty, human-animal companionship. Flannery O’Connor famously said that Southern Fiction was Christ-Haunted; ninety-nine stories of GOD is beast-haunted.
I have a lot of sympathy for Williams' preoccupation with animals. Like Williams, all saints of God have exulted in animals; St. Francis call the birds his “brothers”, held mass with the fish, and made friends of wolves. But I doubt whether Williams’ vague apophatic theology has the coherence or the substance to sustain her (and her God’s) animal activism. There seems to be a contradiction nestled in her negative theology: if we cannot know anything about God, how can we argue with any confidence for the dignity of animals or the divine injustice of animal cruelty?
Still, some of these stories were fun to read for their koan-like strangeness and the sense they give that one reading will not suffice to tease out subtler meanings.
My favorite story, number 28, hilariously captures Truths all believers will instantly recognize: the weakness of the flesh and the fleeting nature of spiritual experiences:
28
He was reading the fourteenth canto of Dante’s Inferno at 2:30 on Good Friday morning. The readings had begun the evening before. There were twenty-seven cantos at half-hour intervals. He liked his slot. It was a good canto—lively—some of them could put you to sleep. His was the third ring of the Seventh Circle, the ring of burning sand which torments those who were violent against God, Art, and Nature.
There were only half a dozen people there, but he read in a powerful, pleasant voice, stumbling over no word. It was a moving presentation, with the bells and silences. It was a tradition at St. Philip’s.
When he left, the stars were shining. It was a beautiful night, save for someone in a BMW cutting through the church’s parking lot at high speed to shave forty seconds off of wherever he was going.
Without reflection, he put out his hand and extended the middle finger.
ABANDON ALL HOPE.
My other favorite stories (with asterisks to mark those stories I will want to read to students in my classroom):
1—Postcard*
3—Aubade*
16—If picked or uprooted these beautiful flowers will disappear*
9—Clean
32—Shaken
33—Irreducible
36—Dearest
65—Dull
72—Whale
87—Plot*
July 18, 2016
I guess "46 Thoughts Joy Williams Had Before Bed, 35 Items of Color Commentary by Your Aunt on Science Stories, OJ Simpson, and Other Assorted News Items, and 18 Short Stories" didn't fit as well on the cover page. Each of the titular 99 pieces in this book is at most a couple pages long, and most are far shorter than that. For all of her plaudits, I found this slender volume by Williams to be frustratingly padded out. Several of the so-called stories are little more than a sentence that she presumably thought was amusing. Often, these lines read like something that would be used to fill a blank space at the end of a column in a magazine article - think more Reader's Digest than New Yorker. Some of the stories are in the "what if God were one of us?" vein, imagining the deity engaged in various quotidian activities. These stories are mostly about as illuminative as the Joan Osborne song - that is to say, not really at all. A few of the stories are interesting little vignettes or have that tautness that can make minimalist short storytelling so effective. But nothing here comes anywhere close to a master like Amy Hempel. I'm giving this an extra star because at least it had the good grace to be short and easily done with, but really there isn't much to this one. Very disappointing.
August 28, 2016
I didn't find these minute stories to be intriguing or funny, just rather odd and tiresome. They read as random thoughts that made the author feel clever. Each one is like a movie that ends in exactly the wrong spot and makes you regret watching it in the first place. Obviously well appreciated by others, but quite unappealing to me.
August 26, 2019
This book was sent to me years ago as part of a subscription box, and I immediately put it in a pile to donate. A book about God? Not for me.
But when I found that pile again, while cleaning out a closet, I started flipping through this and realized it wasn't what I'd thought. It's not preachy or moralizing or trite. It makes no particular religious claims. These stories are short and inscrutable and charming and odd, and I was quickly sucked in.
It's often difficult to pinpoint which character or idea or experience Williams is positioning as God in each of these vignettes. Occasionally she'll be overt and call him by name, as in Story #55, "Neglect":
But most of the time she's far more opaque, as in Story #61, "Museum," which reads in its entirety:
But regardless of how Williams is defining or envisioning the divine, these are tales of being human, and many of them are as powerful as they are amorphous and brief. While I want to describe them as "thought-provoking," what they usually provoked in me was feeling, a twinge of recognition or empathy or wonder.
They aren't really meant to be understood, I don't think. They're too strange and too oblique. But they can be sat with. And that is what I did, for a brief period of time, with each of them.
But when I found that pile again, while cleaning out a closet, I started flipping through this and realized it wasn't what I'd thought. It's not preachy or moralizing or trite. It makes no particular religious claims. These stories are short and inscrutable and charming and odd, and I was quickly sucked in.
It's often difficult to pinpoint which character or idea or experience Williams is positioning as God in each of these vignettes. Occasionally she'll be overt and call him by name, as in Story #55, "Neglect":
The Lord was asked if He believed in reincarnation.
I do, He said. It explains so much.
What does it explain, Sir? someone asked.
On your last Fourth of July festivities, I was invited to observe an annual hot-dog-eating contest, the Lord said, and it was the stupidest thing I've ever witnessed.
But most of the time she's far more opaque, as in Story #61, "Museum," which reads in its entirety:
We were not interested the way we thought we would be interested.
But regardless of how Williams is defining or envisioning the divine, these are tales of being human, and many of them are as powerful as they are amorphous and brief. While I want to describe them as "thought-provoking," what they usually provoked in me was feeling, a twinge of recognition or empathy or wonder.
They aren't really meant to be understood, I don't think. They're too strange and too oblique. But they can be sat with. And that is what I did, for a brief period of time, with each of them.
June 19, 2016
Gosh, I can't remember the last time I gave a book one star. I found the stories weird and puzzling. Many of these short fictional stories I felt had no connection to God.
Thanks to Tin House Books for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Thanks to Tin House Books for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
January 5, 2025
Splendid collection of ultra short fictions, often humorous, sometimes dark, mysterious, and philosophical, making unexpected turns. Not many of the stories actually include God, but the ones that do happen to be among my favorites. Note that the title of each story is placed at the end. Something different.
A sample story: This is # 31. (Sorry, I tried to type it faithfully but Goodreads sometimes changes the format and there's little to do about correcting it)
--------------
The Lord wants to give a dinner party but can never
come up with twelve guests.
Whatever steward He has at the time suggests
many names, but the Lord can't get excited about
any of them.
At least the menu was determined long ago.
There would be a mixture of fifty pure chemicals--
sugar, amino and fatty acids, vitamins and minerals,
all made from rock, air, and water without any kill-
ing at all.
SOCIETY
-----------
Her Paris Review interview. You're welcome: https://www.theparisreview.org/interv...
A sample story: This is # 31. (Sorry, I tried to type it faithfully but Goodreads sometimes changes the format and there's little to do about correcting it)
--------------
The Lord wants to give a dinner party but can never
come up with twelve guests.
Whatever steward He has at the time suggests
many names, but the Lord can't get excited about
any of them.
At least the menu was determined long ago.
There would be a mixture of fifty pure chemicals--
sugar, amino and fatty acids, vitamins and minerals,
all made from rock, air, and water without any kill-
ing at all.
SOCIETY
-----------
Her Paris Review interview. You're welcome: https://www.theparisreview.org/interv...
March 24, 2016
I would say it is difficult to form an opinion on an author just from super short fiction, and this book of 99 stories is a collection of flash pieces - some are as small as a sentence fragment, while others are a page or two. Some of them have characters facing their mortality (where God surely is) and others have God wandering through the randomness of life trying to make sense of it all. There were several clever laughable moments but really I need to read her longer short stories before I have any real sense of Joy Williams. My interest is definitely there!
For true entertainment, read the Amazon reviews of this book (an eBook used to be available), where half the people thought they were buying a devotional text and were puzzled and angry by the end. Ha!
Thanks to the publisher for providing a copy through Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.
For true entertainment, read the Amazon reviews of this book (an eBook used to be available), where half the people thought they were buying a devotional text and were puzzled and angry by the end. Ha!
Thanks to the publisher for providing a copy through Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.
January 23, 2023
at this point Joy Williams could sit in a puddle of ink then fart onto a piece of paper and we'd still be lucky to read it
January 25, 2024
flash fiction not generally my thing but I would still give up an eyeball if it meant I could write anything half as good as literally any random joy williams page
November 6, 2016
Great concept, huge imagination and variety! But...
Most of these stories just weren't strong, funny, crazy, interesting enough.
* 32 stories were absurd in a silly way:
F.e.: The Lord wants to give a dinner party but can never come up with twelve guests. Whatever steward He has at the time suggests many names, but the Lord can’t get excited about any of them. At least the menu was determined long ago. There would be a mixture of fifty pure chemicals—sugar, amino and fatty acids, vitamins and minerals, all made from rocks, air, and water without any killing at all
* 21 stories I just didn't get the plot
Like this single sentence story:
I have never known an insane person, he said. But I have known people who later became dead.
* 15 stories were original but lacked something
You don’t get older during the time spent in church, he told us. He pushed a shopping cart with a few rags and a bottle of Windex in it. We gave him a dollar
* 9 stories made me think
* 18 stories were just, you know, stories. Not much going on. Whatever
* 3 stories I adored! Here are 2:
They had been married for thirty-five years. When the occasion arose, she preferred to use the word pantomnesia, he the term déjà vu. She argued that pantomnesia has Greek roots meaning “all” or “universal”—panto—and “mind” or “memory”—mnesia—and therefore is a more technically accurate term. He suggested that she was a snob. She said that déjà vu simply means “already seen” and refers specifically to visual experience, when there is so much, so very much more in experiencing the unfamiliar as familiar. He reminded her that they had had this conversation before.
A doctor of veterinary medicine who adored cats and frequently treated them at the expense of his other patients, some of whom actually died for lack of immediate care while he was attending to the cats, was killed in a one-car accident while driving home at vesper time when he swerved to avoid hitting a cat and struck a tree. The cat was inexplicably sitting in the middle of the roa
Most of these stories just weren't strong, funny, crazy, interesting enough.
* 32 stories were absurd in a silly way:
F.e.: The Lord wants to give a dinner party but can never come up with twelve guests. Whatever steward He has at the time suggests many names, but the Lord can’t get excited about any of them. At least the menu was determined long ago. There would be a mixture of fifty pure chemicals—sugar, amino and fatty acids, vitamins and minerals, all made from rocks, air, and water without any killing at all
* 21 stories I just didn't get the plot
Like this single sentence story:
I have never known an insane person, he said. But I have known people who later became dead.
* 15 stories were original but lacked something
You don’t get older during the time spent in church, he told us. He pushed a shopping cart with a few rags and a bottle of Windex in it. We gave him a dollar
* 9 stories made me think
* 18 stories were just, you know, stories. Not much going on. Whatever
* 3 stories I adored! Here are 2:
They had been married for thirty-five years. When the occasion arose, she preferred to use the word pantomnesia, he the term déjà vu. She argued that pantomnesia has Greek roots meaning “all” or “universal”—panto—and “mind” or “memory”—mnesia—and therefore is a more technically accurate term. He suggested that she was a snob. She said that déjà vu simply means “already seen” and refers specifically to visual experience, when there is so much, so very much more in experiencing the unfamiliar as familiar. He reminded her that they had had this conversation before.
A doctor of veterinary medicine who adored cats and frequently treated them at the expense of his other patients, some of whom actually died for lack of immediate care while he was attending to the cats, was killed in a one-car accident while driving home at vesper time when he swerved to avoid hitting a cat and struck a tree. The cat was inexplicably sitting in the middle of the roa
June 6, 2022
Reviews between friends on here seem mixed. I thought it was lovely. The casualness of the execution shouldn’t be confused with random ordering; a lot of care and craft went into giving it the superficiality of being slapdash. It’s not. Really just a great little Oulipian constraint type of framing, should you be into that particular kink funk.
October 4, 2017
I really enjoyed this book! It's a bunch of vignettes, some irreverent, some poetic, others peculiar. Still, they make a cohesive whole. It's an easy ready, and it's something different. I highly recommend this book.
May 23, 2019
Really disappointed after all the literary hype. I thought it was a lot of drivel.
October 8, 2015
After reading Joy Williams story in the Sept 14, 2014 issue of the New Yorker while traveling to Mexico, I remembered I had this book on my Kindle. Coincidentally, I was listening to "God and Mr. Gomez" and I'd just finished Thomas Moore's "A Religion of One's Own." God was coming at me in my reading and as it turned out God was everywhere during this trip. Williams 99 mostly very short pieces definitely alerted me to God's presence for she offered "the Lord" in a myriad of connotations, incarnations, situations, distillations. There's no way to describe the quirky, mind-blowing way these stories tweak the brain. You just have to read Williams to understand. So please do so.
March 6, 2017
There's nothing I want to say about this small, intricate, deceptively simple book that hasn't already been said by Justin Taylor in his excellent NYT review, so allow me just to give you the link... https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/bo...
Enjoy. Ponder. Reflect. Laugh. Despair. Wonder. It's all there.
Enjoy. Ponder. Reflect. Laugh. Despair. Wonder. It's all there.
April 22, 2017
Such a fantastic piece of work from Joy Williams, who is incomparable in every way. Impossible not to read in one sitting. What an examination. What a brilliant mind.
July 28, 2017
Economically incisive dispatches on the affair of humans, animals, and deities.
January 21, 2018
95
The American philosopher William James posited that overbelief was essential to a lived life, and that only when we open ourselves to God’s influence are our deepest destinies fulfilled. God provided William with many things, including (according to his sister Alice) the ability to be “born fresh every morning.” He also gave him a brother, Henry, who He determined would be “younger and shallower and vainer.” William quite agreed with this assessment.
96
When a woman sits down to a meal alone, her beloved dead arrive to share it with her, but only at the last moment, the last possible moment, in her prayer that they will.
97
Several months before her death, the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil wrote in her notebook of someone who enters her room one day and says:
“Poor creature, you who understand nothing, who know nothing. Come with me and I will teach you things you do not suspect.”
He takes her to “a new and ugly church,” then to an empty garret. Days and nights pass. They talk and share wine and bread.
“The bread really had the taste of bread. I have never found that taste again.” She is content but puzzles: “He had promised to teach me, but he did not teach me anything.”
Then he drives her away. Her heart is broken and she wanders bereft. Still, she does not try to return. She understands that he had come for her by mistake, that her place was not in the garret.
The text ends with the words “I know well that he does not love me. How could he love me? And yet deep down within me something, a particle of myself, cannot help thinking with fear and trembling that perhaps, in spite of all, he loves me.”
*
January 4, 2018
It seems wrong to give Williams 3 stars because she is a great writer and I loved 'The Visiting Privilege', a truly wonderful book, but this, while at times intriguing, funny and wise, contains scraps from the table really. Not enough nutrition.
November 18, 2024
"Organized religion is an inappropriate response to the divine"
- Tom Robbins
"I feel God in this Chili's tonight"
- Pam Beasley (The Office)
Perhaps the most common trait among the Gods of monotheist religions is that they are in all things. God created the cosmos and everything in it-- ergo God's handiwork is hypothetically everywhere in everything from mountains to moonrocks, from skibidi toilet to the works of William Shakespeare, from your personality disorder to the Dalai Lama.
This makes God an uninspiring and annoying choice for games of I Spy since you could never submit a wrong guess. Such is the basis for Joy Williams's interesting, vague, and sometimes frustrating collection of 99 pieces of microfiction that all (presume to) flash the brilliant, bewildering light of God in unlikely places.
They read like koans, riddles, and even jokes. Williams's literary experiment purports to bottle the strangeness of our universe and use both everyday and outlandish moments to hint at a higher power, some inner clockwork and design behind the tragedy, humor, and unknowable qualities of our lives.
99 stories whip by you in a hurry. My listen to the audiobook (which would not have been my choice at all but the library only has the audiobook-- no print version) made it on one hand difficult to really pause and reflect on certain stories in totality (I have to imagine a majority of these all fit on one page) but also easy to jump back 15 seconds and really try to absorb the most opaque of these vignettes.
I'm not sure "difficult" is the word I'd use to describe cracking some of these codes. We're either left with a vague outline of an impression Williams is hinting at or completely, utterly befuddled. Maybe this is the only way, the most honest way, to get close to God: by meeting informally with an entity that only deals in informalities in the hope that it's a pattern our brains might recognize. We might not even be able to comprehend a legitimately almighty figure if one does exist, and Williams seems to suggest in 99 Stories that only through sifting the vapors of where God has been can we commune with him.
This is a groovy sort of sideway spiritualism that I can get behind (see the Tom Robbins quote at the top of this review, which basically sums up my relationship with faith and certainly organized, formal religious practices). I agree with the central premise: I don't *feel* God when I'm dragged to Christmas Mass or a funeral. If I feel something, and I think Williams gestures at several somethings-- I feel God when I visit national parks, when I see really messy barfights, when I enjoy a really good meal, when a sports team wins a championship, when I get my heart broken, when I hear current population figures, when someone explains the concept of vertical farms to me, when I lose entire days of my life to social media arguments, when I see the most beautiful human alive just fucking walking around an airport. And so on. Somehow, if there *is* God, he's gotta be in all of those things. Every one of them. Threads are there for people willing to string them together.
The problem is that it can make for a wildly uneven piece of literature. Rarely does Williams produce a lightning bolt of insight, something so finely crafted that it inspires a kind of Eureka! moment. The best she can really muster is a sizable handful of snippets that sort of arrange into something semi-related. It doesn't inspire much ponderous thinking (beyond those fairly surface-level implications that God is somewhere rattling around inside your fridge, Elliot Smith's suicide, and the concept of a Roth IRA). Williams isn't threading examples together but instead trying to locate god via batlike sonar. Is that a creative and noble literary exercise? I'd say yes. But it is the antithesis of precision, which is arguably the most coveted and lauded quality we wish to see in our greatest writers.
I don't think the reviewers who think this collection is a bunch of nonsense are being charitable, but I must say I read one review that said it would be impossible to publish this if it were a new writer. That's probably true-- and it might be an indictment of our publishing industry but I'd say the point stands that there isn't enough brilliant writing nor enough connective tissue to make this anything other than a sketch of something that should probably have been smelted down into something more unified and substantial.
Williams has since gone back to the well and repeated the experiment with Concerning the Future of Souls, another book told in 99 unrelated fragments. I hope time and feedback has allowed Williams to recalibrate. I even bought a physical copy to see if controlling the pace deepens my appreciation.
Maybe in time some of the more obtuse blips will make sense to me and help triangulate God's position. Or maybe Williams is wrong conventional wisdom is the best method to solve an unanswerable question: If you're looking for something-- getting lost probably doesn't get you closer.
- Tom Robbins
"I feel God in this Chili's tonight"
- Pam Beasley (The Office)
Perhaps the most common trait among the Gods of monotheist religions is that they are in all things. God created the cosmos and everything in it-- ergo God's handiwork is hypothetically everywhere in everything from mountains to moonrocks, from skibidi toilet to the works of William Shakespeare, from your personality disorder to the Dalai Lama.
This makes God an uninspiring and annoying choice for games of I Spy since you could never submit a wrong guess. Such is the basis for Joy Williams's interesting, vague, and sometimes frustrating collection of 99 pieces of microfiction that all (presume to) flash the brilliant, bewildering light of God in unlikely places.
They read like koans, riddles, and even jokes. Williams's literary experiment purports to bottle the strangeness of our universe and use both everyday and outlandish moments to hint at a higher power, some inner clockwork and design behind the tragedy, humor, and unknowable qualities of our lives.
99 stories whip by you in a hurry. My listen to the audiobook (which would not have been my choice at all but the library only has the audiobook-- no print version) made it on one hand difficult to really pause and reflect on certain stories in totality (I have to imagine a majority of these all fit on one page) but also easy to jump back 15 seconds and really try to absorb the most opaque of these vignettes.
I'm not sure "difficult" is the word I'd use to describe cracking some of these codes. We're either left with a vague outline of an impression Williams is hinting at or completely, utterly befuddled. Maybe this is the only way, the most honest way, to get close to God: by meeting informally with an entity that only deals in informalities in the hope that it's a pattern our brains might recognize. We might not even be able to comprehend a legitimately almighty figure if one does exist, and Williams seems to suggest in 99 Stories that only through sifting the vapors of where God has been can we commune with him.
This is a groovy sort of sideway spiritualism that I can get behind (see the Tom Robbins quote at the top of this review, which basically sums up my relationship with faith and certainly organized, formal religious practices). I agree with the central premise: I don't *feel* God when I'm dragged to Christmas Mass or a funeral. If I feel something, and I think Williams gestures at several somethings-- I feel God when I visit national parks, when I see really messy barfights, when I enjoy a really good meal, when a sports team wins a championship, when I get my heart broken, when I hear current population figures, when someone explains the concept of vertical farms to me, when I lose entire days of my life to social media arguments, when I see the most beautiful human alive just fucking walking around an airport. And so on. Somehow, if there *is* God, he's gotta be in all of those things. Every one of them. Threads are there for people willing to string them together.
The problem is that it can make for a wildly uneven piece of literature. Rarely does Williams produce a lightning bolt of insight, something so finely crafted that it inspires a kind of Eureka! moment. The best she can really muster is a sizable handful of snippets that sort of arrange into something semi-related. It doesn't inspire much ponderous thinking (beyond those fairly surface-level implications that God is somewhere rattling around inside your fridge, Elliot Smith's suicide, and the concept of a Roth IRA). Williams isn't threading examples together but instead trying to locate god via batlike sonar. Is that a creative and noble literary exercise? I'd say yes. But it is the antithesis of precision, which is arguably the most coveted and lauded quality we wish to see in our greatest writers.
I don't think the reviewers who think this collection is a bunch of nonsense are being charitable, but I must say I read one review that said it would be impossible to publish this if it were a new writer. That's probably true-- and it might be an indictment of our publishing industry but I'd say the point stands that there isn't enough brilliant writing nor enough connective tissue to make this anything other than a sketch of something that should probably have been smelted down into something more unified and substantial.
Williams has since gone back to the well and repeated the experiment with Concerning the Future of Souls, another book told in 99 unrelated fragments. I hope time and feedback has allowed Williams to recalibrate. I even bought a physical copy to see if controlling the pace deepens my appreciation.
Maybe in time some of the more obtuse blips will make sense to me and help triangulate God's position. Or maybe Williams is wrong conventional wisdom is the best method to solve an unanswerable question: If you're looking for something-- getting lost probably doesn't get you closer.
September 1, 2020
Ninety-nine stories that are not all about God. What we have is a surprise box of anecdotes, news, allusions, satire, precepts, retellings, and stories with The Lord as a modern-day present and random figure. Some are direct and are easy to comprehend. Most require more time and attention to get to the point, but still, not quite yet. Overall, I think this collection is meant to be a dazzling puzzle, a curious collection that is open to interpretation for all.
July 19, 2025
MASTERPIECE
April 16, 2025
Oh, my God!!
99 stories of God on the wall 🎵🎶99 stories of God 🎶
99 stories of God on the wall 🎵🎶99 stories of God 🎶
November 22, 2023
didn't really read. listened to it and I don't often do that (because it's not reading!) and I don't have a good memory so these were good because they're short....like the voice imitator (by Bernhard)...and there is a thread linking these (read it)...Her prose her as opposed to quick and the dead shows how masterful she is...the voice her WORKS so well: funny, wise, omnipresent, erudite...aaaaaaargh(it doesn't count I didn't read it..."staaaaahp, you're being an ableist...." but it isn't reading...."YES IT..." No, it's literally not. and also don't yell at me...." "quit interrupting me...." "you just--..." no shit.
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last time I was sick and listening and this time I actually read them with my eyes: this and taking care are my favorite collections of Joy Williams' short stories so far (yet to read Visiting Privilege)
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last time I was sick and listening and this time I actually read them with my eyes: this and taking care are my favorite collections of Joy Williams' short stories so far (yet to read Visiting Privilege)
February 7, 2017
The young man read prolifically and knew he bought too many books. He was glad he had not purchased this one.
DISAPPOINTED
DISAPPOINTED
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