Williams has long worked magic with stories that, on the surface, seem quite quotidian, save that something unspoken\u2014and occasionally sinister\u2014lies beneath. The interactions of a woman and her driver in the opening story, \u201cFlour,\u201d are a case in point: She is well-off, but she invents an excuse to get rid of an expected weekend guest so that she can escape her daily life. The driver \u201cspends the nights searching for the missing word in some Coptic riddle,\u201d the woman tells us. That missing word figures in a folktale\u2014Williams being a devotee of the genre\u2014that echoes in the odd events that follow, ending at a destination that, the woman says, \u201cstruck me then as being utterly foreign.\u201d In another story, a man is told he has cancer, then that he\u2019s been confused for another patient but still has cancer. He tells his mother, \u201cAccording to the doctor, I\u2019m dying,\u201d to which she replies, \u201cOh, well.\u201d A talking dog tells an assistant at a writers\u2019 retreat, \u201cThe river of indifference flows through the country of forgetfulness.\u201d The mystical charlatan George Gurdjieff drifts down to Tucson, Arizona, to visit the childhood home of Susan Sontag, whom he adores; never mind that the chronology doesn\u2019t line up. An ethereal child, perhaps a ghost, tells a woman, \u201cImagination only fails us in the end, when the stories we tell ourselves have to stop.\u201d All the stories here are lovely, and so skillfully written that disbelief is suspended forthwith. But the pi\u00e8ce de r\u00e9sistance is \u201cBaba Iaga & The Pelican Child,\u201d where the Slavic folkloric figure meets the murderous naturalist John James Audubon, much to the detriment of her pelican daughter, a searing fable of the destruction of nature and the ease with which humans do harm.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Williams has long worked magic with stories that, on the surface, seem quite quotidian, save that something unspoken\u2014and occasionally sinister\u2014lies beneath. The interactions of a woman and her driver in the opening story, \u201cFlour,\u201d are a case in point: She is well-off, but she invents an excuse to get rid of an expected weekend guest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4861,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4860"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4860\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}