This image is the cover for the book Pariah

Pariah

Ten poignant and perceptive stories from one of the most distinctive voices in Southern literature

In these deeply affecting tales, Joan Williams captures with heart-wrenching clarity the pain and confusion of characters struggling to come to terms with a changing world. “The Morning and the Evening,” which would later be expanded into Williams’s award-winning novel of the same name, is an exquisite and unsettling portrait of a mute man’s isolation. In “Spring Is Now,” a Mississippi town grapples with its prejudices as integration becomes a reality. “No Love for the Lonely” is the touching and gently humorous story of a bachelor liberated and bewildered by the death of his overbearing
sister. In the vivid and unsettling title story, a troubled housewife faces her demons and mourns the life she never had.

Graceful, elegiac, and authentic, the stories of Joan Williams are marked by their compassion and clear-eyed insight. With remarkable skill and an astonishing generosity of spirit, she transforms the quiet lives of ordinary men and women into dazzling works of art.

Joan Williams

Joan Williams (1928–2004) was an acclaimed author of short stories and novels, including The Morning and the Evening, a finalist for the National Book Award, and The Wintering, a roman à clef based on her relationship with William Faulkner. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, and educated at Bard College in upstate New York, Williams was greatly influenced by the legacy of her mother’s rural Mississippi upbringing and set much of her fiction in that state. Her numerous honors included the John P. Marquand First Novel Award, a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

Open Road Integrated Media