@REEL @ahmedbutt I recommend anything by #JoyWilliams, her latest novel, The Harrow, is brilliant.

You have to have a taste for surreal takes on Christianity, a kind of comic flattening that maintains what is deep and strange. She reminds me of Stevie Smith if Stevie Smith was American.

Just finished reading #JoyWilliams' 'Harrow'. It's brilliant. Then as is my want with things that confuse me, I read some reviews. They were helpful, but none of them mention how funny the book is. Joy Williams is sidesplitting funny to me. Am I just weird?

Tom is now listening to One of Those Days
https://open.spotify.com/track/31a6Dmd9ZQ2PVMFBefpxgC

#JoyWilliams

Tom is now listening to One of Those Days
https://open.spotify.com/track/31a6Dmd9ZQ2PVMFBefpxgC

#JoyWilliams

Tom is now listening to One of Those Days
https://open.spotify.com/track/31a6Dmd9ZQ2PVMFBefpxgC

#JoyWilliams

Tom is now listening to One of Those Days
https://open.spotify.com/track/31a6Dmd9ZQ2PVMFBefpxgC

#JoyWilliams

Hooray! JIM Gauer's Novel Explosives has been reissued by its publisher-- it deserves every bit of the high praise that Joy Williams lavishes on it in the review below. If you have time only to read the review and not Gauer's novel, so be it, you'll be the better off for it either way (although you'll thank yourself for diving fully in on this one, trust me).

#literature #bookstodon #mustread
#JoyWilliams #JimGauer
Review: Joy Williams on Jim Gauer
https://open.substack.com/pub/books/p/review-joy-williams-on-jim-gauer?utm_source=direct&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

This review by Joy Williams of Jim Gauer's novel Novel Explosives is spot-on: it's an astoundingly good book that should be on your radar but almost certainly is not. It's extremely playful and dead serious at the same time. The amnesiac narrator thinks he's a heteronym of Fernando Pessoa's, since that's what his ID tells him. Let Williams explain it better than I have the space to here.

https://books.substack.com/p/review-joy-williams-on-jim-gauer

#bookstodon #literature #joywilliams #jimgauer

Reading #JoyWilliams #ShortStories: a lesson in how to write the strange and capture human irrationality.
Technique 1: write an incoherent conversation that makes sense from moment to moment.

What are 5-7 of your favorite authors? Add them as hashtags so we can find each other, boost this, share your own, etc. Some of mine:

#JoyWilliams
#JoanDidion
#JonFosse
#TomásGonzález
#ScholastiqueMukasonga
#RobertoBolaño
#CarlPhillips