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Returning to her legendary short stories, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Joy Williams offers a much-anticipated follow-up to Ninety-Nine Stories of God, which The New York Times Book Review called a "treasure trove of bafflements and tiny masterpieces."
Concerning the Future of Souls balances the extraordinary and the humble, the bizarre and the beatific, as Azrael―transporter of souls and the most troubled and thoughtful of the angels―confronts the holy impossibility of his task, his uneasy relationship with Death, and his friendship with the Devil.
Over the course of these ninety-nine illuminations, a collection of connected and disparate beings―ranging from ordinary folk to grand, known figures, such as Jung, Nietzsche, Pythagoras, Bach, and Rilke; to mountains, oceans, dogs, birds, whales, horses, butterflies, a sixty-year-old tortoise, and a chimp named Washoe―experience the varying fate of the soul as each encounters the darkness of transcendence in this era of extinction. A brilliant crash course in philosophy, religion, literature, and culture, Concerning the Future of Souls is an absolution and an indictment, sorrowful and ecstatic. Williams will leave you wonderstruck, pondering the morality of being mortal.
"Elegantly poetic—and often archly funny—meditations on death by a superb writer." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"As with the previous volume, these pieces riddle the reader's mind with their exquisite enigmas. Williams continues to astonish." —Publishers Weekly
"She's the story writer of our time, choosing to shine light on the wreckage and the difficult choices that lay ahead: all we have to do is listen." ―LitHub, A Most Anticipated Book of 2024
This information about Concerning the Future of Souls was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Joy Williams is the author of four novels – the most recent, The Quick and the Dead, was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 – and three collections of stories, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among her many honours are the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming.
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