The Pelican Child
Stories
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3 Months Free
£5.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Offer ends on 15 July 2026 at 11:59 BST.
The Pelican Child
Narrated by:
Xe Sands, Roger Wayne, Cynthia Farrell, John Pirhalla
Buy Now for £11.50
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Narrated by:
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Xe Sands
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Roger Wayne
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Cynthia Farrell
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John Pirhalla
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By:
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Joy Williams
“An American master is back with crystalline stories that map the personal and political minefields of her unmoored characters. Williams blends everyday dramas with surreal imagery, her voice and range inspiring awe.” —Boston Globe
“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 others—the coiled wit, the sense of a confused and ruined landscape, even the slight whisper of hope that lurks between the words—for the scrupulous effort of telling, in these stories, has a ravishing beauty that belies their subjects. We meet lost souls such as 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,” we encounter a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence; and in the final story, we learn of 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 an indifferent and caustic world. They struggle against our degradation of the climate and of each other, possibly in vain. But each brief, haunted triumph of understanding is celebrated by Williams, a writer for our time and all time.
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