"Night was best, for, as everyone knows, but does not tell, the sobbing of the earth is most audible at night." "Men are but unconscious machines and they perform their cruelties so effortlessly." "Caring was a power she'd once possessed but had given up freely." The sentences of Joy Williams are like no other--the coiled wit, the sense of a confused and ruined landscape, even the slight chortle of hope that lurks between the words--for the scrupulous effort of telling, in these eleven stories, has a ravishing beauty that belies their substance. We meet lost souls like the twin sister heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune in "After the Haiku Period," who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family's deeds; in "Nettle," a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence; the ghost of Georges Gurdieff, on an obsessive visit to the Arizona birthplace of the shining Susan Sontag; the "pelican child" who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Iaga in a little hut on chicken legs.

All of these characters insist on exploring, often at their peril, an indifferent and caustic world: they struggle against our degradation of the climate, of each other, and of honest human experience ("I try to relate only to what is immediately verifiable," says one narrator ruefully), possibly in vain. But each brief, haunted triumph of understanding is celebrated by Williams, a writer for our time and all time.