In 2016, Joy Williams—grande dame of “writers’ writers,” among the greatest living practitioners of the short story, and, according to Google’s suggested search function, only the second most famous Joy Williams in America—sent the writer Lincoln Michel a list titled “8 Essential Attributes of the Short Story (and one way it differs from a novel)”:

1. There should be a clean clear surface with much disturbance below.
2. An anagogical level.
3. Sentences that can stand strikingly alone.
4. An animal within to give its blessing.
5. Interior voices which are or become wildly erratically exterior.
6. Control throughout is absolutely necessary.
7. The story’s effect should transcend the naturalness and accessibility of its situation and language.
8. A certain coldness is required in execution. It is not a form that gives itself to consolation but if consolation is offered it should come from an unexpected quarter.

A novel wants to befriend you, a short story almost never.

Reading this, I felt a pleasant shiver in my chest, like water under wind, and, when it subsided, I understood that the pleasure came from a secondhand experience of Williams’s perfect clarity. It is rare, I think, for an artist like Joy Williams—by which I mean idiosyncratic, experimental, uncategorizable, possessed by a certain streak of mysticism—to articulate so precisely what she is doing. But these eight essential attributes describe her short fiction so well that writing a review of Williams’s new collection, The Pelican Child, is more difficult than I expected: what can I say, other than “she takes her own advice”?

The twelve stories in this slim book—all previously published, mostly in The New Yorker, over a period of about fifteen years—are strange and striking and wonderful. This is not a surprising or divisive opinion; Joy Williams is a widely beloved writer, although despite her acclaim and firm roost in the fiction pages of the most prestigious magazines, something seems to separate her from her contemporaries like Raymond Carver and Amy Hempel (who, like Williams, were at one point edited by Gordon Lish). Carver and Hempel are mainstays of the MFA canon. You can’t swing a dead cat in a craft class without hitting “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” or “Cathedral.” Williams hasn’t yet been enshrined or institutionalized in the same way (although MFA students certainly love her). Anecdotally, I’ve made it through one and a half creative writing degrees without ever being assigned one of her stories. She’s taught less often, I suspect, because her work is stranger and more meandering, which makes it hard to break down and strip for parts. Even when her stories are perfect, they’re not neat.

The stories in The Pelican Child have the clean, clear surfaces that have led some critics to identify Williams as a minimalist, but the density and explosive weirdness that make her something else. There are certainly sentences that can stand “strikingly alone”—consider, from “Flour,” the opening story, this remarkable assertion: “When a little baby dies you think, if they can do it with such wonderment, so can I.”

There are also a lot of animals. Williams’s interest in the natural world—and horror at what we’ve done to it—has been a mainstay of her writing, and The Pelican Child frequently features animals at the white-hot moral center of a story. Some of them are tragic in their ordinariness, like the veal calves made into “creamy little medallions” in “After the Haiku Period,” a surprising caper about a pair of elderly twins who seek to atone for the sins of their billionaire father by infiltrating a slaughterhouse. Others are mythic, as with “Argos,” named for Odysseus’s loyal hound, here reimagined as a canine psychopomp in his own brief, tender story. (“Argos” is the closest Williams gets to sentimentalism, and, look, I won’t lie: she gets really close. Right up to the line close.) But some of the animals are mysterious. One of the bleakest and most beautiful stories in the book is “Chaunt,” about a woman, Jane Click, who moves into a care-home community in the desert, called Dove, after her young son Billy and his friend Jerry are hit and killed by a car while biking back from a ghost town called Chaunt. In Chaunt, “so far away and not even there,” the boys found an abandoned church full of animals.

“They weren’t made-up animals,” Billy said. “They weren’t people or statues.”

“They weren’t zoo animals, exactly, either,” Jerry said. “There wasn’t an elephant or a lion or a polar bear, not exactly.”

“They were waiting,” Billy said, “but they weren’t waiting for us.”

This method of description through negation echoes the tradition of apophatic theology, or negative theology, which holds that since God is transcendent and unknowable the only way to say anything true about God’s nature is to say what God is not. By describing the menagerie at Chaunt only through the boys’ commentary, and only in terms of what it isn’t, the story elides the distinctions between realism and the imaginary and reaches towards something much stranger and more unstable. Call it the anagogical level.

This interest in the anagogical is perhaps the most distinctive element of Williams’s work. Anagoge refers to a method of spiritual interpretation; the anagogical points upwards, to the heavens, and is concerned with the afterlife. I am not a theologian, so the best way I can describe it in The Pelican Child is as an aesthetic reverence for mystery. The anagogical is not literal (which points backwards, into history). It is not moral (which points downwards, to humanity). It is not even allegorical, which as an interpretive mode can, I think, be too neat and clever and dull, too eager to find clear connections and too reluctant to let a story breathe. The anagogical is not any of those things. It is something else.

Later, after the boys’ deaths, Jane Click visits Chaunt in her dreams.

Night was best, for, as everyone knows but does not tell, the sobbing of the earth is most audible at night. You can hear it clearly then, but the sobbing still harbors a little bit of hope, a little bit of promise that the day does not afford. So that was when she went to Chaunt, in her night mind, into the long ruined room full of animals, not analogous to animals, as in a dream, but not quite recognizable as such beings, either. Sometimes, while there, she closed her eyes the better to see them but she could never see them, she could only look.

Most editors these days will tell you to cut the dream sequences. Dreams don’t matter, the logic goes, because in dreams there are no consequences. But for writers interested in the mystical, the ineffable, how can this possibly be true? Chaunt haunts Jane Click the way Jane Click herself haunts the reader; what are we doing when we read fiction if not listening to the sobbing of the earth?

Notably, “Chaunt” (like much of the rest of the book) is set amid ecological decay. The birds are gone, the reservoirs are evaporating, and the mountains are emptied of life. The aging residents of Dove can’t quite face this. “‘There’s something we should have done and we didn’t do it is my suspicion,’” one says. “‘But life goes its merry way without us. Everything’s provisional.’” Another, left nameless in the story, disagrees: “‘I think what’s happened is permanent and not provisional at all.’”

“Chaunt” is a dense story, simple in form but thick with thematic complexity. The “plot,” such as it is, rests on the question of whether Jane will go out to Chaunt to see it in person for herself. But it ends, as many of Williams’s stories do, without reprieve and with only a very limited form of consolation. One of its last sentences is distressingly final: “In time, she would suffer mere death, as had her child and every mother’s child, but those to whom man has awarded extinction surely suffer more than death.”

Death is everywhere in The Pelican Child. It might be tempting to read these stories (or at least the fact of their collection in this volume) as an aging artist—Williams is 81—reckoning with mortality, except that Williams has been writing about death throughout her whole career. “All art is about nothingness,” she wrote in the introduction to the 1995 edition of Best American Short Stories: “Our apprehension of it, our fear of it, its approach.” But Williams is not precious or self-indulgent. A good chunk of the stories’ drama lies in the truth that the old do not have a monopoly on death, that for children death is no less real. Many of the stories— “Stuff,” “Chaunt, “Chicken Hill” most directly, “My First Car,” “The Beach House,” and “Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child” in other ways—productively explore this tension between the old and the young.

This is probably where I should mention that, despite all the death and extinction, The Pelican Child is a very funny book. Williams is a witty writer, dry and precise in her language, and the absurdity of her invented scenarios produces an effect I can only describe as “cosmic humor.” Take the climax of “After the Haiku Period.” Easy comedy is wrung out of the wealthy twins’ clumsy attempts to connect with the slaughterhouse workers by reciting Lorca in Spanish, but the joke heightens and collapses when a worker politely questions them in perfect English: “Atonement is made by a sacrifice of inestimable value. Its sufficiency is infinite. Your act will be sufficient, then?” Williams knows not to let a joke hang in the air too long. More importantly, she is never just funny, and her approach to humor is neither wounded nor precious. The final vignette from “After the Haiku Period” is one of the cruelest and most beautiful disbursements of grace I’ve ever read in a piece of fiction. In some ways, she reminds me of no other writer so much as Terry Pratchett, the comic fantasy novelist with a philosophical bent: Williams’s last two story collections, Concerning the Future of Souls (2024) and 99 Stories of God (2016) feature irreverent, anthropomorphized depictions of God and Azrael that invite comparison to Pratchett’s depiction of the personification of death.

“Despite all the death and extinction, The Pelican Child is a very funny book. Williams is a witty writer, dry and precise in her language, and the absurdity of her invented scenarios produces an effect I can only describe as ‘cosmic humor.’”

When asked in that same 2016 interview if humor was appreciated enough by critics, Williams responded, “Overly desired, I believe.” She has a point. It’s easy to tell people to read a book because it’s funny; it’s harder to say, and believe, and stand by the assertion, that a book will bring you closer to the sublime. But the best of Joy Williams’s stories do.

The Pelican Child may or may not be Joy Williams’s last book. I don’t think she’d mind me pointing this out, as she doesn’t seem like the type to believe she will live forever. Inevitably, then, the question of legacy presents itself: is this a great Joy Williams book? Or just another Joy Williams book? Certainly, the collection has a few minor works. “George & Susan,” in which the mystic George Gurdjieff visits Susan Sontag’s childhood home in Tucson, is slight; both “Argos” and “Baba Iaga & The Pelican Child” were cribbed from themed anthologies and as a result feel somewhat out of place.

But the great stories are unabashedly great (even if you can read almost all of them in The New Yorker, and the others in Harper’s and The Paris Review). I haven’t even said anything about “Stuff,” in which a dying man in his sixties visits his undying mother in her nineties and finds that she only wants to talk about his sister, who died as a baby. Or about “Nettle,” which contains one of the best final lines I’ve read in years. Or about “Chicken Hill,” which opens with a child’s funeral at a dive bar and ends with the mysterious disappearance of five dogs that may or may not have been there in the first place.

There are too many good bits, in short, to talk about all the good bits. I’ll leave you with one from “Flour,” in which the unnamed narrator embarks on a road trip in a large car with three rows of seats. Here we see how Joy Williams harnesses the cosmic to the everyday, the wry to the ordinary. The narrator amuses herself by thinking of the rows as the celestial, the terrestrial, and the chthonic—that is, concerned with the underworld. “In fact,” she opines, “I quite believe that all things—every moment, every vision, every departure and arrival—possess the celestial, the terrestrial, and the chthonic.”